Lucas Camilo

We’ve been home two days now, and Lucas is doing great!  We’re all adapting to our new environment, including all the home versions of the hospital gadgetry that Lucas needs.

Lucas was wide awake on his first day home, and we tried to play with him as much as possible while also coordinating with the people from the home medical supply company and the home nursing agency.  At 11 pm our nurse arrived.  For the next few weeks at least, Lucas will have a nurse with him at night so that if he has trouble breathing while we’re sleeping there is someone already awake and ready to help him.

When we got up Wednesday morning, Burke, Krista, Lucas, and nurse Marli all packed into the car with the stroller, travel ventilator, oxygen monitor, and car battery to power it all and drove downtown.  Between travel time, waiting for the doctor, and our actual visit, we were out of the house almost three hours, and once again Lucas did great.  His new pediatrician is wonderful, and she immediately noticed how cute Lucas is.  The biggest news coming out of the visit was that Lucas has broken the eight pound barrier, with four ounces to spare!

Since then, the past day and a half of our life at home has felt mostly like “normal” family-with-baby life.  Lucas eats, sleeps, poops, and wiggles.  We get to hold him when he’s fussy and take naps with him lying on our chest.  And we have moments that are unique to Lucas — a couple times a day his trach gets semi-clogged with mucus from his lungs and we turn on his home suction machine to pull the clogs out of his throat.  It’s not what we pictured when we imagined parenting, but it’s becoming a “normal” part of our being a family.

Since we’ve been home Lucas has been awake a lot, looking around and admiring his new surroundings.  He quickly noticed the two mobiles dangling monkeys, birds, and butterflies over his crib.  On the ledge further above his crib we’ve put all the items that people brought to the altar at our commitment celebration in June, so when Lucas cranes his neck he can also see a jar of beans, a Virgin Mary, a heart shaped rock, Silvio Rodriguez and Mudhoney albums, a janky picture show, flower seeds, and a quote from the martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.  Since Lucas isn’t supposed to have visitors for a while, it’s nice to have surrounded his crib with items from many of the people excited to meet him soon.

In other news, Lucas appeared in his first mainstream newspaper article today.  Actually, it was his dad who was featured in a Washington Post article with the subtitle “Young heirs seek moral balance between inherited windfalls, social responsibilities”.  It’s a poorly written article, not at all what Burke imagined when he agreed to be interviewed for the piece, but it does highlight the work of two organizations that we care a lot about, CISPES and Resource Generation.  Burke hopes that despite it’s many shortcomings the article will encourage some people to become politically active around international solidarity campaigns and get people interested in the work of CISPES.  Also, it should inspire a few young people with wealth and progressive values to seek forums for thinking through what it means to have privilege, and ultimately convince them to give away more money to worthy causes.  That would be cool.

Finally, it’s a beautiful fall day in Washington DC and the tree outside our apartment is simply majestic.  Just another reason that its good to be snuggled into our home. And speaking of home, we can’t write today without mentioning our wonderful neighbors who’ve brought us food every night this week and thereby allowed us to focus our attention on Lucas – muchas gracias!!