Aspies For Freedom

Congratulations.  I'll bet you are sleeping right now ... and good for you.

some pics are here: http://www.venamous.net/baby/
i'm not marieke, but the proud father. my mother-in-law is here helping out, which is quite nice. and she seems more aspie than me, and definitely more than marieke.

Sorry for the delay. Thanks everybody.

Yeah, his hair is a reddish blonde or a blondish red. Of course, who knows what color hair he'll have when he grows up... my hair was almost black when I was born.

Didn't have any problems with that: I was leaking tons of milk! Still do, though not quite as much. The pain medicine did make me horribly constipated though, which caused my hemorrhoids to come back.

So he's 2 months old today. In the past couple of days he's learned to roll from his belly to his back... he's pretty good at it now.

I think he's also beginning to learn to smile, but I'm not sure. He still doesn't respond to his name at all though... even though he does sometimes react to noises. He's obviously not deaf. The American Association of Pediatricians (or something) says that if at two months old your baby doesn't respond to his name you should discuss it with your pediatrician, so I guess I'll ask her tomorrow at his two month check-up.

Hm, I also didn't get around to explaining the c-section thing. I went into labor about ten minutes after going to bed at 1:20 am. The contractions were pretty frequent (like, every 6 or so minutes) right from the start. At 4 am the midwife checked me and I was 5 cm dilated. At 5:30 or so she checked me again and I was at just over 7 cm. Then, by 4 pm I was still at less than 8 cm despite trying everything. Then we went to the hospital for failure to progress and the doctor decided that I should have a c-section. By then I'd absolutely had enough of labor so I was glad to oblige. Then, the first night I couldn't sleep because of the excitement, my blood pressure that needed to be checked every 4 hours, the baby that needed to eat every 2-3 hours, etc. Then, the second night I didn't really get any sleep either because of the baby that needed to eat and all the people that kept walking in to bug me about stuff... at 2 am someone from administration walked in to ask me for a couple of signatures that they'd forgotten to ask for during the day. I totally broke down and sat rocking on the bed for over half an hour. Then, when they told me that I was doing really well and would be allowed to go home a day early if I wanted to, I grabbed the opportunity and was out of there as fast as I could. <grin>

Huh?  I thought I'd heard of EVERYTHING that gets put out there as the cause of Asperger's.  Are you joking?
Oh, and the important thing, Marieke, your son is absolutely beautiful, and I wish you happiness and joy!

And I thought it was the trauma of going through the birth canal that caused ... well, pretty much everything.  

Well, apparently he (Gene) got his head stuck at a wrong angle or something and that was part of the problem, so kids with c-sections can still have skull-shaping issues. The shape of his head was pretty weird when they took him out of me. Looks perfectly normal now though. That said, me, my brother and my husband had perfectly uncomplicated vaginal births without squished skulls and are on the spectrum anyway. My mom does say that my brother and I had big skulls when we were kids though.

He doesn't respond to "Gene", nor to "gene-gene", nor to "Yevgeny Vladimir Willis", nor to "Yoda"... (his paternal grandmother has decided to nickname him that because she doesn't like the name "Gene"). I've tried asking him if he'd like a different name, but since he didn't respond I guess he must be fine with his current name (or perhaps he just wasn't listening, as usual). <grin>