Abby

A Glimpse of Abby’s First Two Years on This Good Earth

For those of you that don't read Abby's blog, here's the guest post I did for her. Next week I plan to do a similar post about Tim.

I don’t think any of you regular readers of this blog met Abby until we moved to Indiana when Abby was 10 and most of you didn’t meet her until years later. So when Abby invited me to do a “guest” blog I couldn’t think of a better thing to do than to give you a small window into the first 2 years of her life.

First a caveat. On this blog you are used to seeing high quality photos taken by Abby’s fine digital camera. These pictures were taken by a $24.95 Kodak 110 pocket camera. We were not impoverished but chose to spend our money on other things. At least it was convenient in that it fit nicely in Mom’s purse. So don’t try to enlarge the pictures – they only get worse.

This first picture is unfortunately undated but I’m guessing late September 1983. You can tell Abby is going to arrive a fully developed infant. It’s a profile of her mother taken from the dining room looking out the back door at our house on Blue Rock road.

Abby was born a few days later with a fine crop of reddish-copper hair. At her birth the obstetrician said “just because she arrived at 9lb 15oz doesn’t mean she’s going to be a 300 lb linebacker.” To which the attending nurse said “only if she wants to be”.

Here’s some of Grandma Hess’s diary the day of your birth.

“John called about 4 o’clock. I went over and they left for the hospital about 5 o’clock. Timothy woke very happy and was an excellent little boy. We went to Sewing Circle. I took casseroles. John called at church when we were getting ready to leave. Abigail Marie arrived about 12:18 noon. She weighed 9 lb. 15 oz. She has reddish hair.”

Then this entry the next day:

“Papa and I went in to see Lois and Abigail. She surely is a nice bright baby.”

At 6 months pulling Daddy’s beard. Look at those curls!

Two year old Abby found her calling to be a librarian early.

Timothy

Having had the fun of featuring Abby and Jonathan's arrival on planet earth, now it's time to feature Tim.

Here's Lois and Sandi Harnish comparing their sizes on April 13, 1981.

Three weeks later Saturday May 2 we went to the hospital with a lot of anticipation and trepidation. Things didn't move very fast so we got to play several games of Scrabble and even watched the Kentucky Derby before things finally started making more progress with the help of pitocin. Finally after an utterly exhausting night (for Lois) on Monday May 4, 1981 Timothy John Nafziger arrived a healthy 9 lb 3 oz. It was a long delivery and I remember checking the sizes of all the other babies in the maternity ward and finding just one heavier than him but none with as big a head. Here he is arriving home.

There's just these short entries from Grandma Hess's diary:
May 4 Timothy John Nafziger arrived this morning at 4:13 AM.... Papa and I went in to see John and Lois and Timothy.

Here's a professional picture at 3 months all bright-eyed with the determined look of a future activist-peacemaker.

And lastly, here's with Pappy and Grammy at 4 months. Unfortunately Grammy has her eyes closed but remember this was before the days you could snap 10 pictures and pick the one where everyone looks their best.

Jonathan

This week Abby invited me to do a guest blog in her second annual joining of National Blog Posting Month. So I did one for her to post sometime this month about her arrival here on this good earth. I thought her regular readers would be more interested in that than some random musing or political rant of mine. I'm not going to upstage her by posting what I wrote here but I had so much fun with it I decided to do one for Jonathan. It's also appropriate given that he just celebrated his 25th birthday.

So here he is at 2 days old. Lots of people rave about how cute babies are but I remember Pappy saying something like "they all look the same to me." I'd have to say that although cute for a baby, I'm glad Jonathan didn't keep this face into adult hood.

I'm pretty sure that at about one month when this photo was taken he was in deep thought. Perhaps it was about Schrödinger's cat or maybe General Relativity.

Here's some snippets from Grandma Hess's diary around the time of Jonathan's birth.

October 29: Jonathan Ryan arrived by way of C section at 12:39. Lois needed 2 pt. of blood. She was able to be in the same room as Esther Rausch who also had a C section. In the evening I went with John and we took the children in to see mommy. Lois is not very strong. We could see the baby through the window.

Nov 2: ...We then visited Lois and I was able to hold Jonathan.

Sunday Nov 3: We brought Timothy and Abigail along home while John went in to the hospital and took Lois and Jonathan home.