Hello Ryuki

It's been a crazy couple of weeks. Not three days after I last updated the site we had an OB exam scheduled. Mako wasn't feeling anything in particular, so we thought we still had plenty of time before Ryuki came. But no! She was already dilated 6 cm when we went in. The midwife and Dr, who coincidentally is my dad, decided that we should go to the hospital as soon as possible. We were rather surprised, but made a mad dash home to pick up the essentials then went to the hospital.
We checked in around 4:00pm, Mako started pushing about midnight, and Adam Ryuki Parker was born on Aug. 6 at 1:36am. He weighed 6 lbs 13 oz. and was 17.75 inches with a lot of hair.

Things seemed to go smooth after that, but then Ryuki started choking on something or stopped breathing or something, anyway they whisked him off to the nursery telling us it would probably just be 10-20 min. 20 min became an hour and then 2, and we started to get worried. We went looking for him in the nursery where we were told that he had been upgraded to the level 2 nursery. When we finally got to where he was, he was hooked up to various systems and such to monitor his heart rate, oxygen level etc. It was a tense time to say the least, but everything was fine, and he was able to be with us the following morning. And go home with us that night.

I realize this is getting long, so I'll just mention that the following week we had to go back to the hospital because Ryuki had a billirueben level of 25. ( I was told that 18 is high enough for hospitalization ) They had to hook him up to an IV and then put him under these lights for about 24 hours. He slept through most of it, and seemed to take it rather well, but Mako had a really hard time and wasn't able to sleep much.

Anyway, one week later we are generally recuperated and I am back at work. Our sleeping schedules and what not are way out of whack, but that's to be expected. As an ending note, here are some picture of Ryuki with his hair nicely spiked. This was before he went into the hospital, so you may notice he looks a little yellow.