Around these parts, Sunday is Charger Day! Here's the little fan in his first Charger outfit with Mom and Dad this past Sunday.
Update: Now it's a good luck outfit because our San Diego Super-Chargers beat the crap out of the sorry old Houston Texans that day. We're not going to wash it until the Chagers win the Super Bowl! In fact, we're not going to wash him. just kidding...
First, we are all safe and back at home. We are lucky. The fire came pretty close to us but never made it into our neighborhood. There is a lot of ash and soot everywhere but none inside of the house and our air quality is relatively good. Again, we are lucky.
Here's the story: We awoke Monday morning to high winds and dark smoke in the sky. Here’s a video I took just as the sun was coming up. It’s looking to the east and south. You can’t really tell much but it does show the contrast of smoke vs. clear sky and if you look close, you can see the swirling of the tall trees. Everything you see in the sky is smoke, there were no clouds. You would be able to see better but the rising sun was blacked out by the smoke. It reminded me of back east when a severe thunderstorm approaches; low and black with the trees swirling. Except this time the wind was lip-chapping dry.
It was obvious that I wasn’t going to go to work but looking at the news and the fire maps, I still thought it was going to pass well to the south of us. Nonetheless, I insisted that we pack up “just in case.” Brooke kind of laughed at me and frankly I thought to myself that I was overreacting. So we packed for the baby and the dogs but we really didn’t pack well for ourselves. As most of you know, Brooke’s mom Sue has been here helping us since before Parker was born and Tuesday was the day she was to fly home. So she was with us in all this.
Everything appeared to be stable, so Brooke went back to sleep. Then things changed. Until that time, we had been kind of on a line of demarcation between smoke cover to the south and clear blue morning sky to the north. When I noticed that the clear sky was becoming less visible I stepped outside for another look. This time, I found it difficult to breathe and hard to hold my eyes open. It was like when camp fire smoke blows in your eyes except I couldn’t get out of the way. And most disturbing of all, snowflake-like ashes were beginning to fall all around me. That decided it for me. I woke Brooke and said, “Let’s go!”
We piled the baby and the dogs in the SUV and Sue drove our other car. We didn't know where we were going just that we were going north. For those of you familiar with the area, we fled north up El Camino Real through Encinitas and into Carlsbad. Then we turned west towards the I-5 along Palomar Airport Road. These photos were taken by Brooke along that route.
We tried to find a hotel in Carlsbad or Oceanside but all were already full. Our plight was complicated by the presence of two slobbering bulldogs. Here’s a shot from Carlsbad looking back south out to sea.
Fortunately, Parker slept through most of this. Here’s the littlest refugee on the run:
Sue helped us call around and the closest hotel we could find was a Residence Inn in Garden Grove. So we "took a trip to Garden Grove with Wu Dog inside the van":
The hotel was literally right across the street from Disney World and there were a lot of families with children staying there. It was kind of surreal to walk through a lobby full of kids in mouse ears after what we had been through. Here’s the littlest refugee in the hotel:
Sue was able to get a flight out of LAX so she left the next morning. After that we drove across LA to stay with our good friends in Torrance. Matt Barden used to work with me before going to medical school at USC. He and his wife Kat were very kind to open up their nice home to us on Tuesday night. Of course they offered to let us stay as long as we needed but the news was saying that our area was no longer evacuated so we headed home on Wednesday. This is shot was taken coming down through San Clemente. That’s not a color effect we’ve added. That’s just the color of the air due to all the smoke.
The drive home was exciting because we drove right through the fire on Camp Pendleton at the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Here are a few shots from that.
As I said before, we are very lucky. Others not so far from us were not so lucky. Here’s a map of the fire from the signonsandiego.com web site.
The Witch Fire is the big one in the middle that burned east to west accross north of Ramona and south of Escondido. You can zoom in and see where it got into Rancho Santa Fe. That's only about 2 miles east Olivinhain where we live. Thanks to a lot of firefighters and a little luck, it stayed out of our area.
I guess that’s enough for now. Cell phone service has been spotty so we will try to return all your calls as we can. Thanks to everyone for all your prayers. We’re fine now so save them for all those poor folks around here who weren’t so lucky.
I think I figured out how to embed videos into the posts. I know some people are not able to access YouTube on their work computers so these embeded videos below may not work here for them. Hopefully, the embeded videos will not affect you ability to see the blog at all. Again, I'm counting on your feed back to let me know how this works. Of course, you can always go to our YouTube link to the right and see all of these videos.
These two were shot yesterday (Friday) in his crib. To view these, first click on the play icon in the center of either video. Then click a second time and the video should start. Remember that the video is loading as you watch it so the first time it may freeze up momentarily a few times. But you should be able to replay it without freeze ups. Good luck and let me know how it goes!
I have not yet figured out how to embed video into the blog posts, so for now I’m going to try setting up direct links to my YouTube account. I’m taking videos of Parker with the digital camera and posting them on YouTube.com. Hopfully folks will be able to just click on links I place in these posts. If it works, I’ll do more.
So here goes…
The following is a very short clip taken during the previous tummy time post. Click on the following link and it should take you to my YouTube page and start the video automatically. When you get there it may take a minute or two to load the video depending on you connection. Please give me some feed back via comments on how this works out for everyone.
There is sound if you have it on your computer! Why is it that babies make you talk silly?
Update: I've added a quick link to my YouTube account under the "our favorite links" to the right. You should be able to go there and see all of our videos.
This sequence of shots are actually a few days old. I think they were taken on Sat. 13th so he would have been 4 days old. He was determined to pull himself up over that pillow. He can hold his head up briefly and he sometimes pushes up on one side and just about rolls over. He's still got a little ways to go but it's fun to watch him try. Sorry we've been a little slow on the photos this week. I've started back to work and Parker has turned into a nocturnal eater. Brooke is taking the brunt of it but I'm not excactly getting enough sleep either. It's ok though. We're just grateful that he's eating and gaining weight. I'll try to get some more pictures and updates up in the next few days. stay tuned...
Little Parker made his first trip to the baby doctor this morning for a routine checkup. We’re happy to report that the doctor said he was doing fine. He’s almost gained back all the weight lost since birth and his eating gets a little better every day. His heart and lungs sounded great and his skin tone is good. His little umbilical cord is healing nicely and may be done in the next couple of days. They did say he doesn’t start getting shots until 1 month.
Basically he’s eating every 2-3 hours during the day and every 3-4 hours at night. In between that, he mostly sleeps. This is going to sound weird but I’ve come to look forward to finding a dirty diaper when it’s time to feed him because that means we can take care of everything at once and not have to get back up for a couple of hours. Last night was the most challenging so far. He got a little off-cycle early in the evening but after midnight we were able to get back on track and sleep for more than one hour at a time.
We want to thank everyone who’s called and sent gifts and flowers. We haven’t had a chance to call everyone back yet but as we get our sleep/eat/poop routine straight we certainly will. I’m trying not to go overboard with the photos but here are a few more.
The baby doctor released him today and we came home around 10 am this morning.
Last night wasn’t too bad. Parker woke up about every 2 hours and we are slowly getting the hang of feeding. But the doctor said he looked great this morning and he's sleeping peacefully behind me as I type this post. Right now we’re all just trying to settle in and maybe get some rest. I’ll follow with more details later. But for now, we know everybody just wants to see more photos.
