Benigno Erasmo David

Today is the first day we will not be able to visit Ben-Ben.  The road conditions that Hurricane Irene have created are too dangerous for us to traverse them to the Brigham.

So this is the first time we’ve had to stay home in the last two weeks and finally clean and sift through the mess of our apartment.  It has only hit us this morning how much love and support you all have provided for us during this both happy and trying time in our lives.  From the supportive emails to the hilarious texts and phone calls and postcards to the incredibly generous gifts you’ve sent, you have all been amazing, and we can’t even express how touched we are.  Truly, thank you from the three of us.

Though Ben-Ben has yet to encounter his many possessions at home (which by the way already outnumber what Lawrence and I own for just ourselves), he has already been meeting some of his new toys.  His blue bear and purple sock monkey decided to play Cops and Robbers, with the blue bear choking the sock monkey (thanks to our nurse with a good sense of humor) while Ben was blindfolded (1) to protect his eyes from the blue bili-lights and (2) to play along as an innocent bystander.

benig turns 2 weeks old tomorrow, which corresponds to a gestational age of about 32 weeks.  after losing a little weight after birth, he’s now plumped up to 3 lbs 12 oz.

ben’s also starting to look less like an alien, and more like a really, really cute baby.  in fact, he may be too cute: i don’t think i’ll be able to punish a kid this adorable.

the nicu advocates that parents and premature babies bond daily in “kangaroo time.”  during these hours, we lie ben facedown on our bare chests.  the skin-to-skin contact does several things:

• calms ben by giving him a heartbeat to hear, like he used to in the womb
• provides him with warmth
• stimulates lactation in mom
• makes dad happy
• supposedly promotes healthy infant neurodevelopment

kangaroo time was introduced in hospitals about 20 years ago.  a nicu nurse told me that as recently as the 80s, it was thought that premature babies needed to be kept in strict isolation: even doctors were encouraged to stay out of the nicu, and that they needed to sign in to see the babies.  i find it remarkable (and a bit scary) how much neonatal care has changed in only two decades or so, especially when you consider that the art of baby rearing has been practiced for thousands of years.

in any case, kangaroo time “feels right.”  mom, dad, and ben all find it to be a great way to catch up on much-needed sleep.

Ben’s bilirubin levels are elevated (common to newborns).  UV light breaks down bilirubin and so they’ve got him in a little tanning salon.  And I thought we were getting him out of Staten Island …

An interesting fact a nurse told me: before UV lights were available, nurses would just put babies out on windowsills like little pies.

In deciding to name our child Benigno, an incredibly Filipino name foreign to most our son will ever encounter in his life, we’ve already found ourselves having to explain his name.

“What’s his name?”

“How do you spell that?”

“Interesting.  Where is that from?”

I have resorted to saying, “Ben-ee-g-no. It’s spelled like “benign” with an “o” at the end.  But you can just call him “Ben” for short.”

That usually provides the inquirer with relief. “Ahh an American nickname I can remember” is what I read on their faces as they hear a more familiar name.

Meanwhile, Lawrence and I continue to try to work on what exactly we’re going to call our son.  For months while he was in utero, we called him “Bata David”, meaning “Kid David”, while we didn’t know his sex.  We still sometimes refer to him as “the Bata” or “the Bats”.  I like to call him Ben-Ben, in following the Filipino protocol of choosing a monosyllable sound that is twice repeated as the nickname.  Lawrence seems stuck on “Benig”, with accent on the first syllable.  It just sounds to guttural and ugly to me.  And to top it off, my sisters call him “Benigs” with accent on the last syllable.

In yet another name fiasco, his last name on his medical records so far is “Cruz”. He was born so quickly that they stuck my name on his records.  But his birth certificate reads “Benigno Erasmo David”.  We’ll worry about that mess at a future time.

Poor Ben-Ben will have to deal with his name for the rest of his life.  Good thing he’s named after Lawrence’s genius great-grandfather who with limited education translated Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” into Kapampangan, a Filipino dialect.  He also happens to share a name with the most recent Filipino revolutionary, Benigno Aquino Jr.. As for his middle name, which I haven’t even touched here, it comes from my deceased father, whose compassion and passion for working with the disenfranchised I hope he can one day emulate. As it turns out, he also shares a close middle name with Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s physician grandfather who had earlier ideas about evolution strikingly close to his famous grandson’s. I guess Benig’s got a lot to live up to already with his large, long, foreign name.

Benigno Erasmo David was born at 10.12 PM on August 12th, 2011.  He was 10 weeks early to the party and weighed 3 lbs, 8 oz.  Mom had a C-section and Dad was very worried.