My First Sunday, by Max

Hi everybody. This is Max. I wanted to tell you how rough my first day at church was. It started out all right. I loved my littled ducky outfit that one of Mommy's neighbors gave me.

But then I got a little bit nervous about being adored and passed around by all those
people at church. Just the thought of it made me a bit queasy...so I threw up.

Really I had no reason to be nervous. Everyone at church said I looked adorable. And they all talked about how Mommy didn't look like she had just brought me here 2 weeks ago.

I didn't like Sunday School too much. I fussed my way out of that meeting and got myself into the much more comfy mother's lounge. My mom was so good at making me comfortable that I relaxed a little bit too much and spit up down her shirt and tinkled through my diaper, through the blanket, and down Mommy's skirt.

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Mommy and I left church right away and for some reason when we got home, Mommy wasn't anxious to put new clothes on me. So I just chilled in my stylish garbage collectors.

But I soon found a softer blanket and I decided to take a nap.


I love my naps. They make me happy. I have happy dreams.



In fact, sleeping time is some of my best thinking time.


Maybe I should think about how to behave better next Sunday.

Max at 1 week

Here is some video of Max. It's amazing how much you long a little newborn can hold your attention. Sometimes we will lay next to him and just look at him as he makes countless facial expressions in his sleep, which range from looking like he's in excruciating pain from a circumcision to smiling as if he's in a warm uterus. Do you think babies dream? If so, did they dream in utero? If so, where do they get the ideas of which they dream because they have yet to process any visual pictures? Do their dreams then consist only of sounds that they've heard before? I guess these are pointless questions, but ones that we've thought about over the last week.

Max has decided that he likes to sleep all throughout the day and have little interaction with his parents. However, he does like to wake up from 10pm-2am and doesn't seem to understand that we want as little interaction with him at that point as possible.

He is a cutie, though. It's amazing how fast the bonds start to build between parent and child.

Baby Maxwell

Sharing an August 1 birthday with the likes of Francis Scott Key, Herman Melville, and Coolio, Maxwell Ryan Meacham decided to come into the world after 14 hours of induced labor at 11:46 pm. Weight: 8 lbs, 7 ozs. Length: unknown.

The labor process was quite “laborious” (how ‘bout that for a descriptor). Apparently, Baby Max just didn’t want to come out. I mean, who wouldn’t want to stay in a microwave oven drinking over and over again his own urine to his heart’s content?

The delivery was unique for me because the nurse midwife, knowing that I was a 4th year med student, convinced me that I should be the one delivering the baby because this might never get to happen again. So I scrubbed in and when the time came, pulled out his greasy cheese-caked body.

We actually had a little scare for a few minutes when he came out. The cord was wrapped so snugly around his neck that they couldn’t reduce it, but had to cut it off him before he was out of the birth canal. He came out completely blue and limp. After I tossed him onto Sarah’s belly for 5 seconds while they dried him off, they quickly took him over to the incubator where they placed a bag valve mask over his mouth and pumped oxygen into his lungs. He stayed blue and still hadn’t moved. They called the NICU nurse to come intubate him. After a minute of endotracheal ventilation he started turning pink and about 30 seconds later he started moving on his own. They took the tube out 5 minutes later and he has done fine ever since.

In total he was probably motionless for about 3 or 4 minutes, but it seemed like a couple of eternities waiting for him to show signs of life. We were so grateful for the nursing staff who acted so quickly to resuscitate him. I have no doubt that had it been a home delivery he would not have lived.

Sarah was a champ throughout it all. In fact, true to form, she seemed more concerned about other people than herself. She asked Dad Jeffery if he needed an extra pillow for his head while he rested, and then she kept asking all of the nurses, doctors, and midwives about their own children. It was very painful for her, but she was very much under control. She didn’t even need me to do the Bill Cosby cheer I had prepared ahead of time: “Push him out, shove him out, wayyyyy out!” (Actually, I might have been slapped if I had tried.)

In short, things are well. We hope you all get to see him at some point, hopefully sooner than later. He seems like a real calm fellow so far.

Nite Out 2008

This is from way back in April when our med school holds its annual talent show to benefit the Columbus Free Physician's Clinic. We also were asked to sing this song that Kelly made up to a regional group of med school administrators.

Day at the Races

We found out that we've been living in a horse racing paradise for almost three years and we haven't done anything about it. Scioto Downs track is just a couple miles south of the beltway and holds a trove of good experiences waiting to be had.

It was only $3 to get in to watch the races because the venue makes most of its money off the people that gamble on the races. I thought that we ought to be good citizens and provide more revenue to this beautiful venue. Wouldn't it be good to participate in a little gambling so that we might understand and be able to better relate to those that suffer from such addictions?

It was Elder Maxwell that said the study of doctrine will do more to change behavior than the study of behavior will change behavior. That established, wouldn't it be easier to understand the viles of gambling by participating in it rather than reading about other peoples' experiences with it?

Well, truth be told, we didn't put down any money on any horse that night. But we did try to make guesses among our dinner party to nail the trifecta, perfecta, or the exacta. Those weren't the only terms we learned that night. We also learned the difference between a standardbred vs a thoroughbred, a trot vs a pace, a harness race vs a saddle race. We also learned that not all jockeys are petite (to put it nicely).

This post was initially supposed to have a third picture. But for some reason the pregnant lady did not think it becoming to show her beautiful belly in the doorway. So instead I took some artistic freedom to recreate for you all what pregnant lady looks like. These dimensions are proportional and realistic in every way. T minus 4 weeks!

Smoky Mountains

Did you know that this is America's most visited national park? And to think that I hadn't even heard about this place before arriving to Ohio.

Wildlife in the Smokies is incredible. Over the course of the trip we counted 145 deer, 11 elk, 5 black bears, 2 snakes, and 3 salamanders. The bears were all at a distance, but the snakes were more up close (I nearly stepped on one, and the other one I accidentally ran over with the car).

Monster Truck Rally

You know, sometimes being a hick is fun. Six months ago Sarah and I went to the demolition derby at a county fair. This derby was located just ten miles out of Columbus, a city of two million people, but of the 35 entries in the derby, only two or three were from Columubus. Everyone else was from a Hickville, OH.

And that's why when we heard of this opportunity for the Monster Truck Rally, the Meachams were stoked.

But when we got there it was kind of a shock. Sarah had told me I was going to need ear plugs. I had initially thought she was being overly cautious in the normal Sarah soon-to-be-mother type of way, but she wasn't pulling my chain. With the deafening growl of the engines and the annoyingly shrill microphone of the emcee designed to penetrate the stoutest of ear plugs, my head and ears hurt despite my earplugs and two hands squeezing to attempt to create a tight seal around my ears. As a future ENT, I could just imagine the cochlear hair cells getting fried in my inner ear. As a future father, my instict was to take off my coat and wrap it around Sarah's belly to save the hearing of my cute little fetus.

Perhaps the best part about the event was the people watching. From across the arena I could spot a thirty something year old with a mullet and beer belly standing up and waving his arms around his head as one of the trucks jumped. In the row in front of us a father had purchased for his son some earplugs that were shaped as oversized monster truck tires; the tires were squishing this poor kid's face, but he kept them on only because he thought he looked cool.

It's experiences like these that let me know that it was the right thing for me to come to Ohio. Oddities abound everywhere. Finally, a place where I belong.