Charlie Owen is 6 months old. Time sure flies when you’re born right as a pandemic is starting. He is such a sweet and smiley baby. He’s the perfect calm to his brother’s storm. Sometimes he just stares wide eyed at Emmett, trying to figure out where all his energy comes from. He can roll from his tummy to back, which he does almost immediately after you put him on his tummy. He has rolled a few times from back to tummy, but he doesn’t seem particularly eager to master that skill yet. He’s not sitting up yet, which is normal for my babies. When your head is that big, it makes you a little top heavy. His head is still in the 99th percentile and he is 18 lbs 10.5 oz and 27 inches long. He blows raspberries and screeches like a pterodactyl. He’s loved every food we’ve given him. He lights up at any type of music--even when I just sing to him (which is not a pretty sound). He started waving back at us this week.
He has this way of smiling that just lights up his whole face and it’s impossible not to smile back. He will happily sit and play in his car seat for an hour or more while Emmett and I swim. He’s a great sleeper, but I think his natural wake time is 6 AM and the rest of our family’s is more like 8 AM, so we’re trying to bring him over to the dark side. I treat his 6 AM waking like a night feed and then he’ll sleep till 8.
He grabs everything within arm’s distance. But he has really long arms, so I keep thinking things are safely out of his reach and then he finds a way to stretch and grab it. Might need to start training him to play first base like his momma. He’s almost ready for size 4 diapers and he’s in 12 month clothes. Emmett is still in size 5 diapers, for reference.
When I was pregnant with Charlie, I didn’t worry about loving him as much as Emmett. I knew I would. But I was worried that I wouldn’t like his personality as much as I like Emmett’s. I thought I was really unbiased in thinking Emmett’s fun, outgoing, crazy personality was actually the best there was and I knew Charlie would be completely different, so would I think all the stuff he did was as funny or as cute as I think Emmett is? And then would I subconsciously give Emmett more attention and give Charlie lots to talk about in therapy later? I’m only 6 months in to this multiple kid gig, but I can already answer that I am, in fact, totally biased and think that both my kids have the best personality--even though they are polar opposites. Emmett loves his little brother so much, but he has had a really hard time with the attention we’ve had to give Charlie. He’s so used to one of us being able to help him immediately, so he gets really mad when he has to wait because I’m nursing or changing Charlie. He also has a personality that thrives on attention, so when he doesn’t feel like he gets enough attention or he doesn’t like what I just told him, he’ll just come up and smack me. We are working on his patience and talking through our emotions and not hitting me. Luckily, he has never taken it out on Charlie. It’s been pretty hard for me because I’ve been dealing with some postpartum depression (that isn’t helped by a pandemic and being so far from family), and Emmett just seems to be getting harder as he tries to adjust to not being the center of our world. I keep reminding myself that he’s only 2. He has a better vocabulary than some adults and he is learning his letters and planets and constellations, so it’s hard for me to remember that he still is so young and doesn’t have a full grasp on his emotions. And neither does Mommy. We are all trying to figure out this new life as a family of 4. But the best part is that Emmett and Charlie are starting to play together and it completely melts my heart and I start crying every time.
After Charlie was born, we had a bit of a scare. This is probably a pretty boring story, but it was part of my life for the first couple months of his life, so I want to remember the good and the bad. One of his newborn screenings came back slightly elevated. It was for detecting glutaric acidemia. It’s an extremely rare organic acid disorder. If he had it, it would mean that his body doesn’t make enough enzymes to be able to break down certain amino acids. Then the build up of the amino acids in the body can cause brain damage. The disorder is treatable with a very strict diet (low in lysine, and supplementing with carnitine). I first heard the news over the phone. The doctor wasn’t our normal pediatrician and she said that she wasn’t too concerned, but it was something they had to look into to rule out. They set the detection levels really low so they can catch every instance of the disorder. For this particular test, the limit they set for a positive result is .5 and higher and Charlie’s level were at .54. So, she recommended that at our already scheduled doctor appointment, we just try and get a urine sample from Charlie. I honestly wasn’t too worried about it until we get to the appointment and our actual pediatrician was really worried about it. She was telling me all about the specialist we would need to get in touch with and saying that since I was breastfeeding, I’d have to be on a special diet. She wanted to get a urine sample and then some blood tests from the hospital. Turns out, getting a urine sample from a 4 day old is harder than you would think. They have a special plastic bag for collecting it inside a diaper, but we waited a half hour and he never peed. And then he peed as soon as we took the bag off, of course. Our doctor also thought he looked pretty yellow, so we gave up on collecting the pee and she sent us to the hospital to get his blood drawn. So we drove over there, had to wait in a room full of sick people (it was only in January, but I was already worried about covid) to get registered and then they pricked his foot to test his jaundice levels. The levels came back high, but not enough to admit him, so we were ordered to put him in indirect sunlight as much as possible. The next day, we went back to the pediatrician to have his urine collected and I waited an hour for him to pee but no luck. Then, they took the bag off and he started peeing and we scrambled to catch the last part of it. There was basically pee everywhere. They got enough of a sample to test it and send it to the lab. The results took over 2 weeks to come back and I was a nervous wreck. I would just start sobbing out of nowhere. I was already so intimidated about having more than one kid, but then to have a kid with a super strict diet that we probably couldn’t afford to give the best treatment to was just all so overwhelming. I know there are worse things, but when you’re getting a few hours of sleep a day, and you just gave birth, and you are trying to take care of two kids all on your own, every little bit of added stress can be such a trigger.
After a long 2 weeks, we got his results back and most of his levels were normal—which ruled out the glutaric acidemia. But this time, his carnitine levels were a little higher than they would like to see, so the metabolic specialist wanted to do another blood test. He said he didn’t think it would be a carnitine deficiency, but he needed more info to rule it out. This time, they needed more than just a foot prick, so I took him to another branch of our doctor’s office and they drew a full vial of blood from him. If I thought getting his urine sample was hard, getting a vial of his blood was impossible. His veins were so tiny and he was a surprisingly strong newborn, so when he got poked, it was really hard to keep him still. I held him in my lap and held his legs down while a nurse held his arms still and another nurse tried to draw his blood. It wasn’t hot in there, but we were all dripping sweat. It took over an hour to get enough blood because it was so hard to find his veins and he kept moving and then his blood wasn’t flowing quickly enough so it kept clotting. At one point, it was after 5 PM and they asked me if I wanted to come back and try again another day. “And have all of this poking and crying and sweating be for nothing?!? No way!” So, the sweet nurses stayed late to finally get enough blood so we wouldn’t have to come back and do it all over again. They tried both arms multiple times and then finally had the best success in his tiny little hand.
Those results took over a month to come back and they came back completely normal. Except when they called to give me the results, I was at the park with Emmett and Charlie so it was a little hard to hear. I thought the woman introduced herself as “Jenny from the Epilepsy Center”. So, for a half second I was sick to my stomach that they found something else. But then she told me that his results were great and he was a perfectly healthy baby boy. I openly cried with relief at the park. We are so lucky to have this beautiful healthy boy as a part of our family!
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