Holly and Tom Underwood Family

The past year was like no other I’ve known: pregnant for the first 8 months, then a new mom! Luckily, the pregnancy was very smooth for me. I didn’t want to find out the baby’s sex, though Tom did. Since I was doing all the hard work, we didn’t find out. Maybe next time, honey! Tom dubbed the baby ‘Acorn’ in the meantime. I loved feeling my body change, especially when I started to feel Acorn moving around. What an amazing feeling! The only hard part, really, was enduring this summer’s incredible heat. Usually I’m not a fan of air conditioning, but this year was a different story.

  

On the morning of Saturday, August 18, what I thought was indigestion turned out to be labor pains. Several hours later, as the midwife placed the baby on my chest, I saw that we had a son. And so, at 11:09 PM, we welcomed Zachary Ryan Underwood into our family. He weighed 7 pounds 15 ounces and was healthy as can be. (Here he's one week old. His onesie says 'iPoop'.)

The next five weeks were rocky ones for our new family. I bled more than most women do, and it took two trips to the emergency room to finally discover and remove some placenta that had been missed after the delivery. Thank God Tom was home each time I had a bleeding episode, or it could have been much worse. 

We ended up in the ER with Zach too. When we took him to his pediatrician on day 6, we learned that he has a cleft palate. Over the weekend he just wasn’t acting right, so we returned on Monday and she sent us straight to the ER at Children’s Medical Center. There we learned that because of his cleft, he can’t create enough suction to get the nutrition he needs from nursing so he was dehydrated. Zach was in the NICU for three and a half days, during which I learned how to use an electric breast pump so that we could continue to feed him breastmilk. In those early days he had a lot of formula, but now is exclusively a milk man. We’re happy about that, because it’s important to us that he gets all the natural goodness that is found in breastmilk.

Zach is now healthy as can be, seven months old and weighing in at about 19 pounds. He loves to smile and giggle, can sit up unsupported and is figuring out how to roll over. Crawling isn’t far away now! There is a cleft palate team at Children’s which is made up of a plastic surgeon, dietician, audiologist, and other folks. We have met with them a few times now, and they will follow his progress until he’s 21! We will schedule his surgery soon, for some time in early summer.

 

Other than the huge change that comes from learning how to be parents, Tom and I are much the same. Tom is working at the Dayton View branch of Dayton Metro Library, and likes it most of the time. I switched from full- to part-time at Cityfolk at the beginning of August, and now work three days a week. I bring Zach to work with me two days out of three; on the other day either Tom or my Mom watches him. That arrangement is working out pretty well so far. 

If you'd like to see more pictures of this cute little cousin, click here.

Take care!

Holly