Welcome, Charlie

Misty says she's "too tired" to post a blog entry about our new addition to the family, so she asked me (Travis) to do it for her. Yeah, right, I say -- come on, how hard can delivering a baby and nursing him be?! :)

Okay, so first the vital stats. Charles David Moesser was born at 2008-06-11T14:07-0600 (that's 2:07 PM MDT Thursday if you're not an enginerd like me) at the Logan (Utah) Regional Hospital Women's Center. If you want to know the latitude and longitude, check my blog entry on Jack's birth. He weighed in at 6 lb 2.2 oz (2784 g) and was 19.5 inches (49.5 cm) long. By the way, if you didn't know, I work for an aerospace company that does business with NASA and the scientific community, so I'm used to reporting numbers sometimes in both imperial and metric units -- usually, though, it's hundreds of thousands of pounds and metric tonnes, not ounces and grams. He was delivered by James P. Benedict, MD, as was Jack.

Misty was induced at her doctor's order, at a gestation of 36 3/7 weeks (by ultrasound measurements), so little Charlie was technically born premature by 4 days. Probably because he was born "medium rare" instead of "well done," he had three brief episodes where he stopped breathing in his first four hours of life. Luckily, he was being observed by the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nurses at the time, because they're always concerned about lung development on premature babies. His O2 saturation dropped below normal levels, and he started to turn "dusky" when the nurses had to pat-start his breathing again. He was admitted to the NICU for observation. His blood work initially seemed to indicate that he might have been fighting an infection, but this later turned out to not be the case. So we still don't know exactly why he stopped breathing those times, but otherwise he was a completely healthy baby boy, and was discharged from the NICU after only 19 hours and not having another apnea episode. He spent the remainder of our 48-hour post-delivery stay with us in Misty's room or in the well-baby nursery. We left for home around 3:30 PM Saturday.

Here are some pictures from the hospital:

Charlie is quite exhausted from his birthing ordeal, and from those mean nurses wiping and poking and taking blood and injecting and rubbing and inspecting him. You can relax now.

Despite having known each other for over 8 months, Misty and Charlie are properly introduced for the first time. He seems to be less than thrilled.

Charlie is recuperating from his first two apnea episodes. He has started to regain his pink coloring and is no longer "mottled."

In the category of "first time for everything," Mommy struggles to control her elder child while taking delicate care of her younger.

Jack assists Daddy in a cheesy self-portrait. Thankfully, our new camera has smile detection, so simultaneous perfectly cheesy grins are now possible from multiple self-photograph subjects.


Misty thinks, "Are we ready to do this again?" or maybe, "You'd better help more this time," or maybe it's something more tender and loving.


Charlie's dressed for the ride home, and has everything he needs -- namely, his Binky.


Jack holds still for 0.75 seconds, just long enough to pose for a picture with Charlie in his car seat. The chest buckle in the car seat doubles as a chin support for Charlie. I don't remember Jack being this small, but he was!

Jack, what do you think of your baby brother Charlie? Well, no, this is actually what he thinks of his peanut butter/tortilla roll-up, but we can pretend.

Actually, Jack has been a pretty good big brother so far, and Charlie has been a very good baby, except he hasn't got his schedule set to Mountain Time yet (that's why I'm finishing this post at 1:00 AM). Jet lag is what I'm thinking -- those storks likely travel thousands of miles to make their deliveries. Let's see, what else... he's a skinny little guy, and I'm afraid I'm going to break him whenever I have to change is diaper. He has zero butt and chicken legs. But he's a good eater, so hopefully that doesn't last long.

Well, I'm done, but Misty's up and so's Charlie, ready for another feeding. Good night!