One Week

Routine

Abra­ham is one week old and I’ve still not man­aged to get rid of him. I took him to Pet­co the oth­er day to see if any­one want­ed to adopt him. That did­n’t work, so I went to Home Depot to try and return him there. Home Depot will take just about any­thing back but they would­n’t take the kid.

We’ve been told that rou­tine is the most impor­tant thing for a new­born, so we’ve been try­ing to estab­lish one. Abra­ham’s in utero rou­tine was to wake up at 10pm and be up from 2–5am every night. This has con­tin­ued for the most part ex utero. We’ve been try­ing to change that using var­i­ous meth­ods. The first is bath time. Every night at 8, and try to keep him awake until we feed him right before 10. By doing this we hope to get a good start to our sleep. This only sort of worked, we neglect­ed to real­ize that by sleep­ing all day, of course he’s going to par­ty all night. Yes­ter­day we kept him up with fre­quent small feed­ings and he decid­ed to stay awake for a few hours on end on his own. Last night he only fed twice, at 1:30am and at 5. I bare­ly woke up in my mem­o­ry, but Deb­bie says I was fuss­ing near­ly as much as the baby when he cried.

Naming Convention

We chose Abra­ham, after a mod­er­ate amount of delib­er­a­tion, because we want­ed a strong, bib­li­cal name that isn’t used all of the time. The name Abra­ham cer­tain­ly fits that bill, and I hope my son grows into it; and becomes as strong and hon­or­able as his namesake[s]. The bib­li­cal Abra­ham is huge fig­ure in Islam, Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty, and Kierkegaard [and oth­er philoso­phers, so I’ve been told] have used the sto­ry about him and Isaac as a frame to ana­lyze eth­i­cal and moral behav­ior.

There’s also Abra­ham Lin­coln; a pil­lar of human­i­ty if ever there was one.

In terms of nick­names, I’m not a fan of Abe, but I like Bram. And Abra­ham rolls off the tongue so well that there isn’t much need to short­en it. Every­one liked the name except for the cross­ing guard.

Depend­ing on who you ask, you’ll get a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent answers for his mid­dle name. Orig­i­nal­ly, I did­n’t want to give him one, Abra­ham Har­vey being impos­ing as it is. But in Feb­ru­ary, my grand­ma died. Her name was Frances Sue. I con­sid­ered hav­ing a boy named Sue for a brief time, but set­tled on Fran­cis, which works out well since Deb­bie’s father is named Frank.

Miscellaneous

Abra­ham wig­gles alot.