149 and 189

"This time, the numbers do not reflect the number of days we've been married"
That's right, dear. That would be 1090. Happy 1,090th day anniversary, dear!

Last week Monday we took Hyrum in for his two month check up. He got his shots and for the first time we saw him in Real Pain - not just I-haven't-been-fed-in-5-minutes or I-don't-wanna-bath pain, but Real Pain. It was real hard. He recovered manfully.
"Daddy held him."
And thought about Joseph Smith the entire time.
"Sorry, Daddy"
Joy came back in the room just as they started the poking. No fun.

But the real problem was with his measurements. He weighed 8 pounds, 2 ounces, a mere 1'1 above his weight last month. And he'd only grown 1 cm from the hospital's measurement (which I think HAS to have been off because he's much longer to me than he was before. And given that my arm hasn't shrunk and he doesn't fit nearly so well in it as he used to, I should know.)
"And you should know" Joy says as I typed that.
At 8 pounds 2, that put little Hy below the 3% line. Now, I've been hanging out with a bunch of nutritionists lately and I do my dissertation work on malnourished people. One of the primary ways we measure if a child is chronically malnourished is if they're more than 2 standard deviations from the norm ... below the 3% line. I freaked. I was always so Proud of our skinny little boy, and had no idea he was that underweight.
"I wasn't as worried about the percentage at first. I was just wondering if my baby was really hungry for food I wasn't giving him. I didn't feel that the percentage told me that until Derrill told me how concerned he was."

Our doc here didn't give us much guidance for anything we weren't already doing. So we called my uncle the doctor. He said 1) don't worry: the 3% comes from fat Iowa babies who eat corn and milk from the cow every day; and 2) gave us an idea how fast he needs to grow and some things we could do to let us know if we should still worry. I never appreciated Uncle Sherm as much as I did right then.
"So far I like Uncle Sherm just fine"
He's in Colorado. The first time we called, he was out in his pasture fixing his horse fence.

So anyway, we've been working HARD to get Hyrum up to code. Joy mostly. I have contributed mostly by staying up until the wee hours to give Hyrum a middle-of-the-night feeding (and getting a lot more work done in the process), and by cheering on my wife. As has been par for the course, we've had to change our plan of attack on a near-daily basis. On Wednesday, Joy took him to the doctor's office to get him weighed.

And the result is ....... he gained nine ... TEEN ounces in only nine days!

That puts him at a whopping 9 pounds 5, otherwise known as 149 ounces. He still has a lot of room to grow - he's not a chubby baby yet by any stretch, but we can't see his rib cage anymore, and that is quite good.
"He's got some chubby cheeks"

And what does 189 have to do with all this? To celebrate, Joy took me on a date to go bowling. Even though we haven't been bowling for over a year thanks to our tendonitis problems, I scored a 189 on our first game; my fourth-best game ever. I was pretty stoked.

Still no word on a new camera. These are all pre-feed Hyrum.