Avraham Naor Fromm

Thursday was the 8th day of Dylan's life. Jhos, the rabbi who officiated our wedding, officiated his Bris at our home. We gave him two names -- Avraham, which means the father of compassion, after Lorien's maternal grandfather; and Naor, which means light (both illumination and enlightenment), after Rich's maternal grandmother.

Out for a walk

We finally got a chance to try out the Moby wrap today -- we took Dylan on a short walk to the Edible Schoolyard at the nearby middle school, before the deluge of the first winter storm arrived (sympathy going out to our friends Heather and Ed for the wet weather on their wedding day). I think it may have taken us longer to get out of the house than it did to actually go on the walk. Dylan seemed to enjoy the walk to the extent that he can enjoy things as a 10 day old -- he basically slept through most of it.

Just to make sure that we had the hang of it and didn't drop the baby, we first tried the Moby out with Snoopy. Snoopy seemed to enjoy it too. :)

Lorien's parents depart for Toronto tomorrow morning. Rich's Mom is staying to help out for about another week and a half.

More cuteness

Ok, this is out of order timewise (this was taken last week when we were still in the hospital), but we finally had a chance to sit down and look at all of the pictures taken so far, and this one strikes me as pretty adorable, and somehow I overlooked it before.

Settling in at home

We're settling into a routine at home. Feed. Change. Sleep. Repeat. The total amount of sleep we're getting in every 24 hour period isn't actually that bad, and it's much more than I was expecting. It's just not one single continuous sleep period. Lorien's parents and Rich's Mom are all in town, and they're helping out, which is making things easier. We've also been blessed with a pretty mellow baby -- Chillin' Dylan as I like to call him.

Our biggest concern so far has been his weight. Having both Dylan and Lorien spend time in their respective ICUs made it a bit more difficult to get feeding going. All babies lose weight after birth (something I hadn't realized before), but the doctors get a bit concerned if the loss is more than 10%. In Dylan's case, for a 6 lb. 14 oz. birth weight, that threshold was 6 lb. 3 oz. He bottomed out at 6 lb. 0.1 oz., but before we left the hospital he was up to 6 lb. 4.5 oz. We just got back from a visit to the pediatrician, and now he's up to 6 lb. 8 oz. So we're halfway back to regaining birth weight. Yay Dylan!

We just took him on his first walk with the stroller, wandering around North Berkeley on some errands. It seemed to go well, in that he slept through the entire time.

We're home

Not much time to say anything more, and not uploading any pics right now, but I just wanted to let anyone know that might be reading this that we got home from the hospital yesterday (that's Monday -- right?) afternoon. And last night wasn't too bad. The sleep wasn't continuous, and not what I would have considered reasonable a short while ago, but the overall length wasn't actually too bad.

Still at the hospital

We're still at the hospital, hoping to come home tomorrow (Monday). If that's the case, we'll have been here a full week -- just like the old days! We're starting to reach the point where we're getting eager to be home.

Busy juggling a bunch of things, so I don't really have the time yet for a detailed posting. But here is your daily dose of Dylan.

All together now

Lorien and Dylan are continuing to make progress, although the time spent apart has made feeding a bit more difficult than we had hoped.

Last night was the first night that we all spent together as a family. As might be expected, I'm kind of tired today.

Special thanks to Kim for the cupcakes, Alicia for the coconut juice, and Alice for being willing to run errands for us and check up on Dirk and Selena.

Out of the NICU

As helpful as the staff was in the NICU, I'm happy to report that Dylan was able to leave this morning. Mom, Dad, and baby are now all sharing a regular room. Being able to hold Dylan and move about without having to worry about a tangle of wires and tubes is a wonderful feeling.

Thank you to everyone for the wishes and blessings and congratulations that we've received.

Welcome Dylan

We are pleased to announce the arrival of Dylan Rigel Fromm, 6 lb. 14 oz., 20.87", at 5:56 AM on 13 October 2010.


It was a long, hard journey, with 45 hours of labor, and it would be an understatement to say that things didn't exactly go according to plan. Not that I think that many births do. Ultimately it ended with a C-section and both Lorien and Dylan in their respective ICU's. But Lorien and Dylan are both going to be fine, Lorien is now out of the ICU, and the hope is that Dylan will be out by the morning. Rich is also doing much better after having had the luxury of some sleep.
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Please wish us luck in adjusting and healing in the days ahead. We can't wait for all of you to meet our beautiful little boy

Waiting...

Today is precisely 40 weeks, and we're waiting with a mixture of patience, anxiety, and anticipation. But it's late enough now that it would be extremely unlikely for us to get the date 10/10/10. Which is fine, there are far more important things in the world.


We still haven't gotten done everything around the house that we had wanted to, but we're actually in not that bad of a shape, the house is in a reasonable semblance of order, and the room that will become the nursery is reasonably clear of stuff. (Much thanks to Tom Cavnar for helping me to move the desk down to the newly remodeled room in the basement earlier this week.)

We're trying to relax a bit and enjoy the time we have remaining before our entire world is turned upside down. So the whole day wasn't spent on baby prep, the latest bout of warm weather prompted us to head downtown for some gelato. And Lorien decided she was up for biking! (It was her first time on a bike since 7.5 months.) Alas, it did not get labor started. Yet.



Hmmm... either blogger or me (or both of us) suck at visual design. See the detailed post at http://richandlorien.blogspot.com/2010/10/waiting.html for the full photo sequence to be visible. [At least with FF3 on ubuntu that is; YMMV.]

I just made two gallons of chicken soup

You know, in case the baby prefers that to breast milk :)

36 weeks - Sausalito

My birthday present from Rich this year was a massage at a prenatal massage spa in Sausalito. We had meant to make an afternoon of it, but it was unusually chilly over there, so we returned to Berkeley for gelato. We went to the new place in Epicurious Garden, "Lush", that replaced the old mediocre Chao Bella. Rich is now telling anyone who will listen that Lush has the best gelato he's ever had ("they have two kinds of vanilla!!").

Anyway, here's a 36 week belly shot.



Oh, and this being Berkeley, on the way to get the gelato, we passed a shrine to the late mountain lion.

Another heat wave

Although not as bad as last week so far. It's like it waited until I was nearly 8 months pregnant to ambush me. The cats are both passed out in the heat, but that's nothing special.

Anyway, here's a link to a local columnist musing about the consequences of our erstwhile cold summer. Indeed, the tomatoes have been rather lame, although the local wildlife are leaving ours alone this year so we actually get to eat some. Perhaps Dirk is earning his keep.

In other news, a mountain lion was shot and killed not far from our house early Tuesday morning. This would be a highly unusual occurrence for our neighborhood.

Never thought I'd say this...

...but thank goodness the fog is rolling in. The temperature hit 95 degrees (about 35C for all you who don't deal in Fahrenheit) yesterday, and all I could do was hide inside and drink cold water. I will not complain about how cold this summer has been any more, I swear.

Birthday excursions

Rich and I celebrated our birthday this year by heading into the City to see the Musee d'Orsay "Birth of Impressionism" exhibit at De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. The Orsay is circulating some of it's collection while it undergoes renovations. It wasn't a bad collection, and included several pieces that we hadn't seen when we were in Paris last year. When this show closes in September, it will be replaced with the post-impressionist exhibit "Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse and Beyond" which we hope to catch before the baby comes, although if necessary, maybe we'll go in the winter with baby.

We walked around the park some, then headed back downtown for tea at Samovar, where Rich had never been. They provides a ridiculously fancy overpriced tea service, but are also really good. We need to go back some time to sit on the patio, which was unfortunately not feasible due to the high winds and cold cold cold.

We finished the day with dinner at the Slanted Door in the Ferry Building. It was pleasant, although I'm losing the ability to sit still for a two-hour dinner.

We didn't take many pictures yesterday, but the ones we did were from the observation tower at the De Young. Mostly we observed fog (par for the course for this very cold cloudy summer we're having). The first picture shows the green roof at the Academy of Sciences.


And here's a 31 1/2 week belly shot of me overlooking the Richmond district.


All in all a lovely day. As it has been noted by myself and others, what a difference a year makes!!

28 Weeks

Rich and I just started looking seriously for baby paraphernalia this weekend. There is a dizzying array of choices of carriers/strollers. Also, we need to decide on some bedding scheme so that the baby can sleep in our room for the first few months (bassinet, moses basket, cosleeper, whatever).

We also went to the Silent Film Festival again yesterday, which was a nice break from baby decisions.

Anyway, here's a belly pic at 28 weeks (yesterday).

25 weeks

Weekend activities

Rich and I finally took advantage of our birthday present from David last year, which was a gift card giving us access to a menu of "experiences" in the San Francisco area.

Rich took a flying trapeze lesson at the San Francisco circus school. Here's a little video of flying Rich. Now he want to take lessons.



I chose to do the archery lesson for two, so I took Alice to the Archery Range in Golden Gate Park near the ocean. Our instructor, Ed, was very thorough and methodical in teaching us, so we had pretty good success hitting the target from distances up to about 30 feet. We both also hit the bullseye a few times.

Archery is a good sport for pregnant women, since it only requires the arms and shoulders. Highly recommended, especially since flying trapeze was out. Rich points out that flying trapeze results in every muscle being sore the next day (or 3), as well as some fancy bruising behind the knees.

Here's a posed shot by the target before getting started.

And here's an action shot as we're both preparing to take a shot.

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Summer Pie Time

For about a year and a half Rich has been welcoming the new seasons by baking pies with the produce that comes into the market. I've been mostly eating the pies and giving a thumbs up. Here's Rich's second-to-most recent pie, which was strawberry rhubarb (my favorite).

This past weekend we went on a pilgrammage with some friends to Swanton Berry Farms U-pick fields between Santa Cruz and Pescadero. The ollalieberry season was just starting, and the strawberries were in full swing. Rich comprimised his all-ollallieberry pie dreams because they weren't sweet enough and baked a strawberry-ollallieberry pie which may have been his best pie ever. However, it was a pie for eating, not photographing.

Here's Rich and friends with our haul at the berry farm.

Just for fun...

...here's a belly shot from Kathryn and Gil's wedding last weekend, when I was 21 weeks along.

Ok, I'm telling the internet

Sorry for the long time no blog. Rich has been posting his 140 character or less thoughts on Facebook, but Facebook sucks and I've got news that I don't want to tell Facebook:
We're cautiously but happily expecting a new member of the family on or near 10/10/10.

Here are some of our 20-week ultrasound pics.

Oh, and it would appear that our first child will be a masculine child (to quote Don Corleone).

Mastering the Art

Long time no blog.

I guess I've been chattier lately on a finer granularity, on Facebook. It's a bit easier to say something brief.

So there's loads to catch up on (and lots of pictures that I need to go through, which seems to be a recurring theme), but I won't get too into that now, except to say that we enjoyed our 2 week trip back east for my nephew Matt's Bar Mitzvah and then traveling around seeing friends and seeing the fall colors. I will get pictures up eventually...

But the topic du jour is food. After coming back from Europe we had gotten pretty excited about French food and had a desire to expand our cooking horizons a bit. But we hadn't managed to get around to it much. Seeing "Julie and Julia" kind of reminded us again and prodded us to consider it more. Reading "My Life in France" (one of the books that the movie is based on), which my sister-in-law Laura got for us, also helped.

So a little while back we checked "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" out of the library, to give it a test drive. We were pretty impressed with some of our initial efforts (Ratatouille, Garlic Soup) that we decided to go ahead and buy it.

So this past weekend we dived head first into a major cooking extravaganza, Beef Bourguignon. It's quite an undertaking. Start to finish it was about 5 hours of prep time. But it's not really that bad -- a good chunk of that it's just sitting in the oven cooking. A big enough chunk that we easily were able to sit down and watch a movie ("Whatever Works", Woody Allen's latest). And apparently the dish only gets better if you let it sit around a bit, so we made the main course ahead of time on Saturday, and didn't have that much work to do on Sunday, when we were serving.

But we didn't just stop there, and before we knew it, we were planning a 5 course meal. At times some of the minutia of our planning conversations were perhaps a little embarrassing -- trying to figure out what wine to use for the Beef Bourguignon (it takes a full bottle), or what kind of mushrooms to use (how can Julia possibly just say "mushrooms" -- I guess she couldn't anticipate the dozens of varieties that we have to choose from in Berkeley), or obsessing over what kind of bread to buy for the appetizer, and was it appropriate to use the same kind of bread for the croutons for the salad (we ended up with just one kind).

Regarding the wine, I've always been of the opinion that while it's silly to use too nice of a bottle of wine for cooking, you should also have some minimum standards, and not use anything you wouldn't want to drink. We couldn't find any inexpensive Burgundy reds at BevMo, but I found one bottle of Burgundy for $7 at Trader Joe's, and decided that that would surely be drinkable enough. We poured most of the bottle into the dish before it went in the oven, but I saved a little taste for us to sit down and enjoy with the movie. It smelled decent, and had the right color, but when we actually tasted it, I was pretty horrified -- it was not a very good wine, to say the least. Way too acidic and lacking in flavor. Definitely something I wouldn't want to drink a bottle of. Well, it was too late to do anything about it, and as it turned out, the dish was still amazing. So maybe it's a good thing we tasted it after adding it, because if we had done it the other way around, we probably would have just dumped the whole bottle. Nevertheless, next time I think we may try something else, to see if a better wine makes it even better.

There's one scene in the movie where Julie has this revelation while cooking mushrooms that she's been doing it all wrong. It was kind of neat making this soon after seeing the movie, because I can now somewhat relate to that. Although the main point of Julia's that Julie was realizing (don't crowd the mushrooms) I don't think as much applied to what I've done in the past -- but I definitely did notice a difference from Julia's other point, of using a much higher heat.

Anyway, it was a pretty epic meal, and although it was a lot of work, I'd say it was totally worth it, and we'd do it again. And it gave us an excuse to serve an entire meal on the china that I've inherited. Thanks to Julia (and Julie) for inspiration, to Todd and Ryan for being willing culinary guinea pigs, and to the librarian at the Berkeley public library for helping us pick out some French cafe music to set the right atmosphere. And to Dirk for graciously helping to lick out the sauce pan.

I had thought about adding one final finishing touch by printing out the menu on little cards, but we need more toner and I decided it just wasn't worth it. So here it is electronically, complete with the requisite amount of fancy restaurant-style modifiers:

Dry farmed Early Girl tomato bruschetta on sourdough toasts
--
Frisee salad with white truffle parmesan dressing
--
Beef Bourguignon
Oven roasted Yukon Gold potatoes
--
Assorted cheeses
--
Molten chocolate cake
Fresh raspberries

The smoking!

In the last post, I remembered that there were 3 reasons Rich and I preferred France, but I had forgotten what #3 was, so I just threw in the language thing, but I just remembered.

The real list was:
1. Public toilets
2. Tap water
3. No smoking in bars and restaurants!!

While the French have the reputation of being walking chimneys, they passed a law a few years back forbidding smoking in public places indoors. So our sojourn there was mercifully free of smoke. When we got to Belgium we were assaulted by smoke everywhere we went, which sucks as a tourist because your limited clothing supply quickly becomes repulsively malodourous.

I think it wouldn't have bothered me as much years ago before I became used to smoke-free environments, but I've become weak and spoiled in my old age.

Barhopping in Brussels

We really enjoyed our day in Brussels. We were intent on trying as many new (to us) beers as possible, and cushioning them with fries, waffles and chocolate in between. And we did some of the requisite sightseeing as well.


Here our some of the highlights:

1. Some of the most detailed stained glass we've ever seen at the Notre Dame Cathedral

2. The Mannekin Pis, a must-see tiny little statue of a peeing little cherub.

3. Our favorite Brussels bar, Poechenellekelder, where we could watch a constant stream of tourists come by to photograph the Mannekin Pis.

4. Said view.

5. The Hotel de Ville, at the Grand Place at night.

6. Our table-mate at the Delerium Pub, which is famous for its selection of over 2000 beers. This picture shows that one thing is common throughout the world - teenagers go for quantity over quality.

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While we enjoyed our time in Belgium, there a three major reasons that we prefered France as tourists:

1. Few public toilets. The ones there are have limited hours and cost. A big problem in a country where you drink beer with every meal and between them too.
2. They won't give you tap water at restaurants. Not that they don't do it automatically like here - they refuse even if you ask.
3. I can't practice my French in the Dutch parts. And Dutch just sounds like fake German.

"If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't."

Another quote from the movie, for what it's worth.

We liked Bruges. It was very cute. However, we weren't happy at the place we were staying (I had to stand on a chair in the shower to get my hair wet, and a few other reasons). Also, the beer bar that is supposed to be one of the best in the world was closed when we were there. So hopefully one day we'll return and have more success.


However, on the plus side, it was nice to wander the well-preserved/reconstructed medieval streets, and ate dinner the first night at a little cafe filled with locals with a great jazz trio. We also had dinner the second night at Den Dyver, a fancy place where they choose a beer pairing for your meal, which was wonderful. The city is purported to be jammed with tourists, but it wasn't crowded at all when we were there.

Pictures:
1. The view of central market from the clock tower.
2. The clock tower.
3. A windblown me in the central market.
4&5. The view along the canals.

The Luberon - Provence part 4

On our final day, we drove east to the Luberon, a region made famous by A Year in Provence, which we'd both read earlier this year. We started by visiting Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, which is a town built over 5 rivers, the Sorgue being the primary one. The antiques market was going on when we arrived and the town was hopping Then we visited Gordes, one of the more famous medieval hilltop villages in the area. We finished our day by going by the Abbey of Senaque, which is famous for its lavender, although it wasn't yet in bloom.

Pictures:

1. Rich with his feet in the river across from where we had our best Provencal lunch - salads and white wine.
2. Lorien on a bridge over the Sorgue.

3. A field of irises on the outskirts of Gordes.

4. Gordes.

5. The Abbey of Senaque.