Evan's homecoming

Say bye-bye to the hospital, and hello to the house you're going to destroy!










The Grandma cavalry rides to the rescue:



Welcome home, Little Man.

Actually, Benadryl is the best medicine

**NOTE** The 4th of July holiday gave me two deadlines in one week, so for the second one I just polished up this one that I'd almost completed the night Evan was born. We'll be back to All Evan, All the Time next week.

As I carried my dog Memphis up the hill back to our house last week, feeling like Forrest Gump carrying a wounded Lieutenant Dan, I wondered if, to a casual onlooker, it might seem as though I was trying to start a new trend, like how rich people show everyone that they’re rich by carrying Chihuahuas around in their purses.

The trouble began when, midway through our walk around the neighborhood, I unhooked Memphis from her leash, which occurs in much the same way someone might unhook a cannonball from a cannon. Memphis dashed across our neighbor’s yard to greet Misty, her favorite Weimaraner, which is a kind of dog and not a type of German sausage, as a reasonable person might assume.

Misty is so much larger than my dog that when she begins chasing Memphis in circles around the yard, as she did that evening, their relationship looks identical to that of a greyhound and a mechanical bunny. Memphis darted between two trees, Misty took the long way around, and when they reunited, the dogs passed each other like two trains in the night, provided those trains were on the same track. Their collision knocked Memphis hard to the ground.

“Game over,” the dogs said to each other with their eyes. Memphis limped back to my feet and sat down as Misty apologized as clearly as if Dr. Doolittle was translating.

Thankfully, through the wonders of modern technology, all I had to do was call my wife Kara to come pick us up, using my cell phone that I’d left on the coffee table.

I hefted Memphis’ thirty-six pounds into my arms and started the long walk home, her head bobbing with each step like Cleopatra riding in her sedan.

The vet’s office was closed when we get home. In the morning, Memphis looked much improved, walking with only the slightest hint of a limp, so we decided to wait and see. When pets are hurt just a little, it’s tough to know whether your decision not to take them to the vet is driven by your sense of what’s right for the animal or by your cheapness. Or your frugality, as cheap people call it.

Even with people, it can be tough to know what to do. A few years back, we’d gotten burned seeking unnecessary medical treatment for Kara. After returning from a vacation in an old, falling-down house, a rash showed up on Kara’s back. Ordinarily, this would have been a wait-and-see medical event, but Kara was scheduled to be a bridesmaid in less than a week. In a backless dress! Well, not entirely backless. The bottom part had a back. But with the rash spreading quickly on a Saturday night, we decided we couldn’t wait for Monday morning to see somebody about it, so our only option was the emergency room. We’d already talked to a pharmacist, and her recommendation to apply Cortaid had done little to stem Kara’s burgeoning leprosy.

As we drove there, I pictured us sitting in the ER waiting room with blood-spattered people calmly holding their severed digits in their laps, waiting their turn.

“Her back’s itchy,” I would whisper to them. “Do you mind if we go first?”

As it turned out, we were the only ones in the ER that night. After waiting for an hour, Kara disappeared with the doctor for ten minutes, then came back out shaking her head.

“What did the doctor tell you?” I asked.

“To take Benadryl,” she said.

“No free samples?” I asked.

“No. We really shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

Our share of the bill came to $450. We should have bought an above-ground pool and filled it with Benadryl instead.

In any event, the past few days have found Memphis back in mid-season form, and she’s learned her lesson. She only collides with Shih-Tzus now.

You can fan Mike Todd with palm fronds at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Evan Monster stomps his way home

We just found out this afternoon that Evan is coming home with us tomorrow. Our little boy is healthy and doing well, so after a month of trips to the hospital, we're very much looking forward to bringing him....okay, we're terrified. But this is best-case-scenario news for us, so let the adventure begin!

And also, chicken soup for his grandmas' souls:

Dog picture withdrawal

Hands shaking, feeling queasy. Must...post...dog....picture.

Ahhhhh. That's the stuff.

Update: And just to keep the new grandparents from rioting, here's a fresh Evan picture, too:

What's that? More baby pictures?

Oh, okay.

Bringing home the baby, almost

“Well, at least you can get some sleep until your baby comes home.” That’s a sentiment my wife Kara and I have heard several times over the past two weeks, and it’s one I often think about at 3:00am as I’m washing breast pump parts in the kitchen sink.

Our son Evan, born two months early in his bid not to miss Transformers 2 on the big screen, has been wooing the nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit (or NICU, an acronym that meant nothing to us three weeks ago, but which has become the most important word we know) since his recent and thrilling entrance into the world. Every day finds him a little bit stronger, eating a little bit more and breathing easier. His doctors expect Evan to be ready to come home in about a week, a prospect that both thrills and terrifies us.

At four pounds, he’s still so small. When a new mother passes us in the hallway at the hospital, wheeling her full-term baby around in its bassinette, I turn to Kara and say, “Did you see that baby? It was GIGANTIC.”

To us, non-preemie babies look like miniature sumo wrestlers, complete with diapers.

Since Evan has been in the NICU, our routine has been to visit the hospital about twice a day, each time bringing a cooler containing the latest haul of hard-earned breast milk. Kara and I have always been very close during our nine years of being together, but I can’t help feeling that we achieved a new level of togetherness when I walked into the room to see her hooked up to a breast pump for the first time.

“This might be the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“Moo,” she replied. Ever since she gave birth in front of a room full of strangers, including nursing students that she voluntarily allowed to watch, Kara has been impressively uninhibited about things that would previously have mortified her. There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s no modesty in motherhood.

With Kara pumping 8-10 times a day, we no longer experience days and nights, just three-hour cycles. My job during all of this is to assemble the pump parts before each use, then disassemble and wash them afterwards. My hands have performed these tasks enough times that my brain doesn’t need to be involved in the process at all, which is generally how it prefers things.

My relationship with the breast pump is comparable to the relationship that the recruits in “Full Metal Jacket” had with their rifles. As I stand at the kitchen sink in the middle of the night with suds flying, my fingers nimbly picking apart the pump pieces, I chant to myself: “This is my breast pump. There are many breast pumps, but this one is mine. My breast pump is my best friend. Without me, my breast pump is useless. Without my breast pump, I am useless…”

And so on. If you’ve never seen “Full Metal Jacket,” please disregard the preceding paragraph. But you’re really missing out on a very instructive breastfeeding video.

When my mom saw Kara’s breast pump, which could be mistaken for a large clock radio with tubes coming out of it, she said, “Wow, these have really come a long way since I had babies around.”

And I wonder, what did breast pumps look like thirty years ago? They probably ran on diesel engines, and someone wearing goggles and a leather flight helmet had to start them and then jump out of the way.

Anyway, until Evan comes home, we’ll continue using the multiple alarm function on Kara’s cell phone to wake us up every few hours. And we’ll also continue looking forward to the time when our new alarm clock will be wearing a little blue onesie.

You can give Mike Todd a squeeze at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Happy Sweet Sixteen (Days), Evan

My wedding ring:



Adios, incubator:

I wrote 25% of a book

A few months ago, Jim Harris, one of the esteemed humor columnists from the Chestnut Hill Local, devised a plan for some of that paper's columnists to band together to publish a book of their best humor columns. Through a clerical error, I was invited to join them.

Earlier today, the fruit of our labor, Local Humor, was born. Or printed, if you don't want to get all anthropomorphic about it.

Here's the description from Amazon.com:

Chestnut Hill Local columnists Mike Todd, Janet Gilmore, Hugh Gilmore, and Jim Harris have not only survived in the troubled and struggling newspaper business, they have amassed a devoted following of fans who shower them with lavish presents like scrapple, bowling balls, and money from Nigerian bank accounts. Until recently, their columns were available only to the readers of the Local, but now you, too, can "LOL" as:

• Hugh warns of the "Enemies of Reading"
• Janet remembers old friends, old flames and ex-coworkers
• Mike deals with wrens, ferrets, and a pregnant wife in his house
• Jim dispenses dubious advice and rails against the system

They each have their own style and shtick, but they share a love of language and an innate ability to find the humor in everyday life. Not since Ben Franklin dined alone at the Mermaid Inn has Chestnut Hill seen such a concentration of comedic talent. Here, from among their hundreds of articles, hand-picked by a rigorous process of "One potato, two potato," is a rollicking roundup of mirthful monologues for your gracious consideration.

So even though I give the milk away for free here on this blog, please don't let that stop you if you feel like maybe it would be AWESOME to buy the cow. By which I mean the cow that is for sale at Amazon.com. With the title Local Humor.

It looks like Amazon has four copies available right now -- that should cover me, my mom, my sister and me again. I can't wait to take advantage of the free Super Saver shipping for which the book Local Humor is eligible!

And yes, the recent birth of our son was just a publicity stunt to drive book sales.

Little tiny baby, big grand entrance

“These cramps feel different,” my pregnant wife Kara said last Monday morning, nudging me awake at 3:30am. I’d been sleeping fitfully; the lightning cracking outside the window was the kind you could see with your eyes closed.

Her due date wasn’t for another two months, so we decided that we’d go see the doctor in the morning. Half an hour later, as Kara walked into the bathroom rubbing her belly, I heard the sound that would forever divide our lives into two parts, the part before and the part after: SPLASH.

I jumped out of bed and saw Kara staring at the tile floor, straddling a small puddle of clear liquid.

“Was that my water breaking?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know!” I said.

“Press ‘0’ if this is an emergency,” said the voicemail message at the doctor’s office, and I nearly punched the zero button through the back of the phone.

“You can come to the hospital now, or come to my office at 9:00am. But maybe now would be better,” the doctor said.

Five minutes later, with the backdoor left unlocked in case we needed to call a neighbor to have our dog looked after, we were driving through the pouring rain, waiting for the GPS to pick up a signal. I could get us close to the hospital, but I didn’t know exactly where it was. Our birthing class was to take place there in two weeks.

“Ow, ow. Watch the potholes!” Kara yelled. “I pay my taxes, why can’t they fix the potholes?”

“We’ll just get to the hospital, and if this is labor, maybe they can stop it,” I said.

“They can stop it?” she asked between moans.

“Yeah, stop it. Suppress it. Something like that,” I said as I looked both ways before running another red light.

At the ER, the nurse stepped outside of our little room with curtain walls and said into her walkie talkie: “We have an admittance to labor and delivery. We have a patient who is 32 weeks pregnant and three centimeters dilated.”

The response came back: “Wow.”

Kara and I looked at each other. “Wow? What does ‘wow’ mean?”

Since our birthing class hadn’t happened yet, pretty much everything we knew about childbirth at that point had come from the movie “Knocked Up,” though our crash course was well underway.

Ten minutes later, we were in a delivery room. An hour after that, a doctor was pulling a satellite-dish-sized light out of the ceiling as the room buzzed with perhaps a dozen nurses.

“Doctor, what are the chances that this isn’t happening today?” I asked when he stopped moving for a moment.

“No chance. The baby will be here before noon,” he replied.

“Oh my God. I have to call our parents,” I said. Paul Revere had less urgent messages to deliver.

Tears welled up in Kara’s eyes. “It’s too early. We can’t have him yet,” she said. I looked at the doctor, knowing that his response could change the trajectory of our lives forever.

“Thirty-two weeks is plenty. He’ll go to Harvard if he wants to,” he replied, and for the first time, we began to breathe a little easier. At least I did. Kara still needed more drugs.

An hour later, the epidural in place, we had a few moments of calm.

“We still don’t have a name picked out yet,” I said. Broaching that topic before the epidural had yielded results not printable in a family publication.

“Do you still like Evan?” I asked.

“I do,” she said, tears falling down her cheeks as she nodded her head. And so Evan Edward Todd was born last Monday at 9:13am, four pounds, one ounce, beautiful, healthy. And exhausted and crying, just like his parents.

You can smoke a cigar with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Ten days old

Evan's come a long way in the past week. He's breathing entirely on his own, gaining weight and starting to regulate his temperature without the incubator, though it'll still be a little while before he's out of his aquarium entirely. No more blue jaundice lights, no more CPAP tubes or cannulas in his nose, just a little feeding tube. He's looking great and we're ecstatic and relieved that his most recent days have been nowhere near as exciting as his first ones.

Behold the cuteness:



That blue knit cap and blanket he's sporting above were both hand-knitted by our friend Anna. How hard core is that? She knitted them. With her HANDS. Does he look like a badass in them or what?

Also, the dog would like me to remind you that she still exists.

No column this week

Dang if my schedule didn't get a little thrown off last week. For the first time since February 2005, when this column started, I missed one. That's what happens when your preemie comes on a deadline day.

I've already got one in the can for next week, though. It's about cats. No, wait, it might be about babies. One baby in particular, actually.