Happy Birthday, Tim!

Too grumpy about poison oak on my face to do anything else, I spent the afternoon looking through the classic pre-digital shoeboxes full of photos. It seemed appropriate for Tim's birthday to show him with each of his kids on the day they were born...both in the same hospital where he was born.

Things were a bit fraught when he was born six weeks ahead of schedule,  but he weighed in at a fairly strapping 5lbs 4oz. They were having something of a population explosion in the maternity ward they sent us home even when his his weight  dropped to 4lb 10 oz. I remember holding him, looking at him and thinking I needed to think of some frame of reference for how small he was, since I knew it would never seem possible later. What I came up with was that he would fit in a shoe box...not boots or even basketball shoes, but just the kind of box my shoes came in.

We took him home to a chaotic household with two toddlers, one of whom had a somewhat dubious case of the chicken pox. We had been walking Matthew around the block in hopes that he would start walking before the new baby came home, but that didn't quite happen. Dana was still in diapers.  

The nurse at the hospital had told us to monitor Tim's temperature,  but in the general chaos, it was several days before we got around to it, and we were alarmed to see that his temperature had dropped almost two degrees from what is considered normal. We put a heating pad under his mattress, brought in a couple of space heaters to augment the heat in his porch like room and kept him isolated there, away from the chicken pox and the cold until he was big enough to regulate his own temperature.

Good thing he was our third child....

He has turned out to be the tallest member of the family at six feet two inches, a wonderful husband, and a great father. He started life on his own terms and has managed to stay pleasant, laid back and kind. He has come a very long way from the shoebox and the overheated nursery. Happy Birthday, Tim!