Henry Joseph Friedler

Welcome Henry Joseph Friedler to the world!! He was born on February 9th, at 1017am. It was a very quick 6 hour labor... and not to brag, but I only pushed for 3 contractions to get him out!

He is very cute, and looks a lot like Owen when he was a baby.

Quickly after he was born, we realized that Henry has a large cleft palate. (He does not have a cleft lip). He also was having a hard time breathing so they quickly whisked him off to the nursery. We learned that he has a very small jaw, and a very small tongue. He was having a hard time keeping is tongue out of his airway. He needed more intensive monitoring. The hospital we delivered at does not have a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) so we were moved to Emanuel Hospital (where I work).

For the past two days, we've been learning to feed him with a special type of bottle and are learning to hold him so his airway stays open. He is also getting stronger hour by hour and is learning to protect his airway too! For being in the NICU, he's pretty healthy.

Here is a quick selection of pictures of the past few days. Tonight Owen met his brother for the first time... he was quite happy they both have noses and both have heads!

This is me and my new baby when he's just a few hours old.

Sweet baby with a huge looking binky. Really, he looks very "normal" when you look at him. You can only tell he has a small jaw when you look at him closely.

Sleeping daddy and baby boy.

My mellow baby... here you can see his feeding tube (in his nose), his tiny IV (in his right hand) all of his hair, and you can see his profile... and his tiny chin.

Tomorrow we meet with the cleft palate team, and learn about our future. We know he'll need surgeries and therapies... but we don't know much information right now. We will keep you all informed. All I can say is DON'T LOOK THIS UP ON-LINE. You will read a lot of stuff that is scary. Unless you can weed through the scary and find the practical... we will just keep you all informed as we learn our future.

We have been through a roller coaster of emotion, tears of joy, tears of fear, tears of sadness and repeat those emotions every few hours. Luckily, we are blessed with great family and friend who are very supportive. We have a beautiful new baby boy...

I just got home tonight from the hospital, and we are on our way back to feed him. We are going to be figuring out a schedule that works for all of us... but I see a lot of driving back and forth in our future!

I will keep you all informed as we get more information.