Family

Sovereign Grace Church January 26th, 2007

In my extensive parenting research, I found a series of tests that tell you if you are ready to have kids. Here are just a few of the highlights:

• The Dressing Test: Obtain one large, live, unhappy octopus. Place it into a small mesh bag making sure that all the arms stay inside.
• The Mess Test: Smear peanut butter on the sofa and curtains. Place a fish stick behind the couch and leave it there all summer.
• The Toy Test: Spread a 5 gallon bucket of Lego’s (or roofing tacks) all over the house. Put on a blindfold and try to walk to the kitchen. Don’t scream, because this would wake up a sleeping child.

To pass these tests, you don’t really have to do much… just endure some unpleasantness without getting too upset. Ashley and I are finding that the real tests of parenting require much more than that. Here are a couple tests we’ve encountered:

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All in five minutes…

Name: Grace Arielle Liggitt
Birthday: September 8th, 2007
Weight: 6 pounds, 13.5 ounces
Length: 19″

All three of us are home! Grace nursed her little heart out today and was able to get enough to stay hydrated and flush excess bilirubin out of her system (”bi-li-’rü-bin: noun, a weird-sounding pigment which causes jaundice if accumulated in excess). I never thought I would be so happy to see full diapers.

We were told this morning that they would run a test at 6pm to see if her bilirubin levels had dropped without any medical intervention all day, and if they had, we could go home. It’s amazing how being in a hospital makes you care intensely about unitless measurements of substances you never knew existed. A bilirubin level of 10.2? Hooray! 10.2 what? Who cares, we’re going home!