Early and small, second child does well thanks to many caring people

In last Friday’s paper, I talked about the trouble my wife, Jenny, and I were having in coming up with a name for our son, who was due to arrive Aug. 23. I asked readers for suggestions, hoping someone might offer one we’d like and use. I thought we had a little time to get some suggestions. Boy, was I wrong.

Declan James Steuck arrived in the later evening hours of Saturday, July 14, almost six weeks early and weighing 4 lbs., 3 oz., which is just a little more than half the weight of our other son, Braden, when he was born seven years ago.

He’s early and small, but we’re thankful he’s alive. If he remained in his mother much longer, I probably wouldn’t be writing about a joyous event in our lives.

Declan’s journey to his birth began Friday night when Jenny mentioned to me that he didn’t seem like he was being very active, something he’d been for quite some time. As time passed, his mother’s observation turned into worry, which turned into insomnia. She stayed awake half the night, playing solitaire on the computer and looking up information about babies not moving during pregnancy.

The next morning she asked me if she should call the doctor, sort of afraid the doctor might think she’s foolishly worrying about something she shouldn’t worry about. I told her the doctor won’t think that, and if it makes her worry less, she should call.

When she called, a nurse told her to eat or drink something with some sugar, as this might jumpstart the baby. I thought her advice was perfect, as I’ve seen sugar’s effect on Braden.

An hour after drinking a sugary latte from McDonald’s to no results, we went into Ministry St. Michael’s Hospital. Nurse Bette, looking at Jenny, found the baby’s heartbeat, making it appear as though we were needlessly worrying about a healthy baby. But after monitoring my wife for a while, Bette determined the heartbeat was in sync with my wife’s heartbeat, which was cause for concern.

After conducting an ultrasound, Dr. Pavel Petkov determined Jenny needed to stay for a while and the baby needed to be monitored. It was at this time we realized our household may be getting larger sooner than we had expected.

Hours later, after watching the baby’s heart rate, he told us they would induce labor on Sunday, and if the stress was too much for the baby, they would take it by cesarean section.

A few hours later, at 10:15 p.m., he said they weren’t going to wait and they weren’t going to put the baby through the stress of a delivery. He needed to come out, Dr. Petkov said. The delivery team was being assembled, he said, and would be ready in half an hour. I wonder if The Avengers could be ready that quickly during a comic-book world emergency.

While Jenny was being prepared for the surgery, I waited in the hallway, suited up for the delivery room. Jenny’s mom arrived at this time, and she told me how she got pulled over in Plainfield going 70 miles an hour in a 35 mph zone. She dumped the contents of the purse on her car seat when the officer asked for her license, which was cause enough to let her go with a verbal warning. It’s probably the only time anyone I know will get off going double the speed limit.

I’m not someone who likes anything surgical. I once passed out in a hospital visiting my grandfather when he showed me x-rays of his heart surgery. I also nearly passed out several years ago when doctors were preparing Jenny for a surgery to have an ovary removed. Last year when I was being prepared for a colonoscopy, I nearly passed out.

The delivery room was no exception. While I held Jenny’s hand during the caesarian, I had to be wheeled out after I started getting light headed. All had started well, as the doctors and nurses in the delivery room enjoyed my telling about her mother’s speeding exploits, but when Jenny said them “pulling” her innards kind of hurt, all the blood went out of my head. I kept thinking about the last scene in “Braveheart” where William Wallace was vivisected.

Outside the delivery room, I drank juice and talked to my mother-in-law, which allowed the blood to return to my head, and when I heard Declan’s little kitten-like cry, I was quickly back in the delivery room.

He was crying and looked healthy, albeit smaller than all the babies I’ve ever handled. Dr. Ralph Locher, the pediatrician who came in for the delivery, said he looked healthy, despite being so early. In attempting to take a photo, I started to get light-headed again and had to be wheeled away a second time.

After recovering and after the doctors and nurses finished with Jenny, we had an opportunity to see little Declan for a few minutes before he was taken to the Marshfield Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Ministry St. Joseph’s Hospital, for strictly precautionary reasons as Dr. Locher nicely explained to us.

Declan is doing well in Marshfield. After losing a little weight, as they expect babies to do, he’s gained an ounce in four days. He’s breathing and feeding well, and hopefully will come home soon. We were told premature babies can sometimes be in the NICU until their expected due date, but all we’ve talked to think it’ll be much sooner than that.

Dr. Petkov told us Jenny’s motherly instinct to come in was essential to him being in the good condition he is in now. Her placenta was failing, and his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. If she hadn’t, it’s likely he would not have survived.

Of course, we’re thankful for the incredible care we received at St. Michael’s. All the nurses and doctors have been extraordinary. At one point, between nearly passing out, I remember seeing the dozen or so people in the delivery room and thinking most of them had to be called in to help us. They were taking time out of their weekend schedule to do something very heroic. I can’t write anything that would thank them enough for their service. Thank you.

As for the name, Declan, it’s one I discovered at the hospital Saturday. I was reading some back issues of Rolling Stone magazine, and in an article about Danny McBride, an actor who plays Kenny Powers on HBO’s “Eastbound & Down,” it talked about his newborn son Declan. I suggested it to Jenny, and she said maybe.

After looking the name up, it became a definite. A Gaelic name that means “full of goodness,” it was the name of an Irish saint who immediately preceded St. Patrick. Half Irish, and with another son with an Irish name, it was a no-brainer. In addition, it’s not common, unlike Braden which seemed like every fourth kid was named after we chose that one.

My wife and I aren’t planning on having any more children. So if you have a name suggestion, send it to someone else you know who is expecting. Make sure you make the suggestion as soon as possible, as we discovered we needed one earlier than we had anticipated.
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Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, July 20, 2012.

Coming up with child’s name could be perfect Christmas present

A conversation with my 7-year-old son, Braden, this morning:


Braden: I want a Wii U for Christmas. Do you think Santa will bring it for me?

Me (changing the subject a little bit): I don’t know. What do you think your baby brother will want?

Braden: A name.

While Braden’s baby brother is still a month or so away from being born, coming up with a name for the child seems to be a longer distance away. Every time my wife, Jenny, and I think we have one, we find a reason not to use it.

My suggestions – Thor, Conan, Kreese, Kurgan, Vader and Bruce – have all been rejected by Jenny. She doesn’t care much for superheroes, movie villains and musicians, apparently.

In turn, I’ve rejected some of her suggestions – Evan, Ethan, Owen, Ian and Andrew. I guess I’m not a fan of names starting with vowels.

Some names we’ve both liked we’ve secretly tested out with others – others being mainly Braden – didn’t pass muster. One name, which I’m not going to reveal due to the possibility we may still go with it, he quickly said was a “girl’s name,” although neither of us had thought so.

A few names are on our “strong possibility” list, but they haven’t made the “definite” list. This is worrisome because Braden’s name made that list early in our selection process, and it never came off it. While we like some of the names on the “strong possibility” list, the fact they haven’t made the “definite” list, yet, makes us think another name is out there waiting for us to find it.

Finding names is pretty easy, as they are all around us. Just browse through the pages of this paper and you’re sure to see dozens of different names, with a wide variety of spellings.

I’m a sucker for using names from movie characters or musicians, while Jenny is big on classic-sounding names that aren’t too popular, yet. Using these criteria, how we came up with Braden is anyone’s guess? It became popular, of course, as soon as we used it, but at the time we didn’t know any other Bradens.

At the time, we combined her father’s name, Brad, and my father’s name, Dennis, and liked the end result. I suppose we could combine our mothers’ names, Karen and Linda, for the new baby and come up with Kalin, Linren or Kada, but those names don’t seem to work as well as Braden did.

If we became desperate for a name, I could hold a contest and ask readers to submit suggestions. The prize simply being the honor of naming a newborn child. It’s not money, but it’s kind of cool.

Just don’t suggest Biff, Ringo, Chucky or Orson. They’re likely to get rejected.
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Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jul y 13, 2012.

With a name like Bear, you've gotta be cool

Bear Grylls gets my annual award for being the coolest person in the world.
If you don’t know who he is, turn on the Discovery Channel and if he’s not on, wait for the next show because it’ll probably feature him. He’s the star of “Man vs. Wild,” a real-life survivor show, along with other survivor specials on the channel.
In “Man vs. Wild,” Bear is flown to some of the most desolate and dangerous areas in the world where he is left to find his way back to civilization. A camera crew is on hand to film his journey and a disclaimer at the beginning of the program lets us know regional experts are on hand to make sure nothing goes wrong, but you never see anybody else and you get a definite feel that Bear is doing everything on the show himself.
Some of the remote areas Bear tackles include the Sahara Desert, an Alaskan wilderness, Iceland, the Copper Canyon in Mexico, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Everglades and Iceland.
I mention Iceland twice, and it deserves a third and fourth mention, because Iceland is the coolest country ever. Growing up, I read about the Vikings and Iceland, how the country is the land of fire and ice, but I had never really seen any pictures much less live footage from the country. Bear shows us how to survive there, although I doubt many of us could, because it’s one cold and hostile country. No wonder it served as home to many Vikings.
Bear is so cool that even his name is cool. If my wife would let me, I would name our next kid Bear. If she doesn’t like that one, maybe she would like another animal name – Shark, Lion, Tiger, Moose, Platypus – they’re all cool. I originally wanted to name our first child Thor for a boy or Raven for a girl, but my wife denied me. We settled on Braden, which is great and fits him perfectly, but it doesn’t have that cool edge a name like Thor or Bear has.
But a cool name doesn’t always make a person cool – Larry David has the most ordinary name ever but as the co-creator of Seinfeld and the star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” he is miles cooler than his name credits him for; and cool people can have lame names – Bono has a clown’s name but he still rocks.
Bear will do anything on his show to demonstrate survival techniques. This includes drinking his own urine, jumping in quicksand, scaling large cliffs without safety ropes, braving dangerous rapids, eating scorpions and sheep eyeballs, battling cobras and stealthily avoiding hippos, one of nature’s most dangerous animals – and one that has a very cool name. I could definitely see a Hippo Steuck in the future.
The best thing about “Man vs. Wild” is that Bear always has cool stories to tell about wherever he is at. And these stories are always about people that either were rescued or perished because of proper or failed survival tactics. As a kid I remember traveling out West and hearing stories from local people about people killed by bison and grizzly bears, and though I was afraid of staying in my tent, I really enjoyed those stories. Bear provides plenty of them to keep me entertained, and slightly frightened of someday being stuck in the same situation myself and not having the ability to survive.
I know I wouldn’t survive most of the situations Bear puts himself into for the show. I’m afraid of heights – actually I’m not afraid of heights, just falling from them – so the minute I come upon a high cliff that I either have to go down or up, I’m done for. I certainly wouldn’t eat the things he does, especially not raw fish and camel testicles. And I definitely wouldn’t jump into Arctic water. I have a hard enough time getting into not-super-warm lakes in the summertime.
But all of these things are what makes Bear the recipient of my annual coolest person in the world award. He doesn’t get anything for this award, except the possibility a child in central Wisconsin may some day be named after him.