Thursday, December 25, 2008

Christmas

We enjoyed a quiet week at home over Christmas. The snowy weather has kept the builders away and we are all snuggled up in the living room.

Space is at a premium in the living room, our only room with heat right now, but Bikkei managed to find a spot on Taka's bouncer.

Taka napping Christmas morning.

We don't have a bath tub at the moment but Taka is small enough to take his bath in a shoe box.

Bath time for Taka.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Taka's Name

We had been thinking about different names over the past couple months trying to come up with something that worked phonetically in both English and Japanese. We settled on Taka and which works in either language and is a beautiful character. It represents a falcon (i.e. a bird from the family falconidae).

The character for Taka.

Taka sleeping under the new blanket from Grandma.

Taka now almost two weeks old with his family.


Monday, December 15, 2008

Welcome Taka!

We welcomed Taka Yamazaki O'Keefe into the world on December 8th, 2008 at 11:44 pm.

Rie went to work on Monday morning and called about noon to say I had to come pick her up. By 4 pm we were admitted into a delivery room.

The contractions were a little painful as the anesthesiologist on duty came in to get Rie fixed up but then his beeper went off calling him to an emergency and we didn't see him for at least an hour and a half.

Aki held mom's hand as he watched the Disney Channel (the delivery room has cable tv and many more channels than we have at home) and sucked on his box milk.

Aki took a short nap but was awake and quite engaged when the baby came out just before midnight.

Taka comes in just under 3 kg.

Mom right after the delivery quite happy to not be carrying that load around in her belly.

Mom holds Taka for the first time just a few minutes after he was born.

Aki holds Taka for the first time in the delivery room. Shortly after we all fell asleep in the delivery room before the nurse woke us up at 4 am and sent us down to our room in the newborn clinic.

Aki holds Taka the next day.

We couldn't bring our dogs but Kota came so Taka could imprint early on a Boston Terrier.

Rie and Taka stayed another night at the hospital and then we got all bundled up and went home on Wednesay.

Ishi sniffs the new creature--"oh no, not another one!"