The diapers, they are a changin’

Dahlia is getting bigger. For the first few days, we couldn’t notice how she was changing, even though everyone else did. Now though, it’s clear. Her whole appearance has changed, and she’s cuter then ever. We’ve added some new photos to the photos page, so check them out.

Also, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who sent their congrats and wishes, etc… We read everything, and we appreciate it all. Thank you very much; it means a lot to us.

- Dave

A Dahlia by any other name

People have been asking us about the origin of sweet Dahlia Esther’s name. We first touched upon the name Dahlia as we were walking the streets of Brooklyn (at Atlantic and Clinton to be exact) just after we found out that we were expecting. We passed by a Met Supermarket with a large flower stand outside, and we began discussing the idea of a flower name in case we had a girl. Natalie noticed some signage for “Dahlias”. We can’t recall if she mentioned the name specifically at that point. In any case, it quickly became a frontrunner on our list of girl names. It wasn’t a sure thing though until Dave used his Scrabble skills to point out that Dahlia is an anagram for “A Hilda”; Hilda was Natalie’s maternal grandmother. Somehow, we had stumbled upon a beautiful name that we both loved and also honors our family.

Beyond that, there are a couple of other elements of the name that we really like. First, we like the fact that it’s a flower, because we already have a Marigold in the family, and we feel as though we are creating a theme. Also, AFTER Dahlia was born we looked up the meaning of the Hebrew name Dahlia and found that it means “a branch bough”. We like this because it connotes strength and solidity.

Dahlia’s middle name is Esther. Mainly we chose this name in honor of my great-grandmother Ethel on my mom’s side. Of course, it hasn’t escaped our attention that Esther is one of the great women in the Bible. She is a figure of courage and integrity (not to mention beauty).

- Dave

Family and friends

We’re three days into Project Dahlia and we’ve already had quite a few visitors.

On Friday, Ruth, Colin and Keri came down from NY and Connecticut to visit. They have been unbelievably helpful in assisting us with our nursery set-up, supplies, food, and all the other little things that will make our transition home so much easier. Keri left on Saturday, and Ruth and Colin are staying until Sunday afternoon.

On Saturday, Jeanine and Mahlon came for a visit. Jeanine was so excited about her first granddaughter (she has 5 grandsons!) and just had a wonderful time holding her for hours while talking to Nat. Mahlon came in and his eyes were just glued to Dahlia. At first, he didn’t feel qualified to hold a three-day-old, but by the end of his visit, he was holding her like a pro.

On Sunday morning, Sara Mariska came to visit and she also fell in love with Dahlia pretty quickly. She was a huge help as well, bringing Dave some non-hospital breakfast food, bearing gifts, and generally just being a very pleasant presence that helped relax the parents through the constant onslaught of doctor and nurse visits in our room.

We will be checking out of the hospital tomorrow (Monday), and look forward to all the visitors we’ll be getting over the next few days and weeks!

- Dave

Day zero

Day zero was labor & delivery day, and the day we met Dahlia.

First of all, due to unforeseen and unpredictable circumstances, Natalie had to undergo an emergency c-section . This is a fairly uncommon thing to happen (but not unheard of), and the doctors acted carefully but decisively before they went ahead with the surgery. So as a result,  we were only at the hospital for about an hour an a half before Dahlia was delivered.

Dad was sitting with mom and couldn’t see much of the action during the surgery. Near the end, he peaked his head over the curtain wall and saw two baby legs about 2 feet away from him. This was followed by a nice piercing cry and the announcement from the doctors that we had a girl. This was an incredible moment for mom and dad. Mom was still weak and drugged, but dad was able to go over and see Dahlia and get to hold her. She was healthy! She was beautiful!

- Dave

It’s a girl!

Dahlia Esther Goldberg, born 6:30PM on July 1st, weighing 7lbs, 3oz. She has powerful lungs and is beautiful. Mom is doing great. More to come…

- Dave

New Twitter Account

In order to manage my multi-blog approach for different audiences, we created a new Twitter account specifically for the Goldberg Family main web site. Our Twitter name is GoldbergFam, please follow us!

- Dave

Nat’s Take on the Previous Post

I want to offer a humble apology. I initially came up with the idea to write a post about our new arrival – the sofa – with the title “our new arrival.” But, I began to have second thoughts, and realized that the joke, well, isn’t that funny. Dave got to it before I could write it myself, or persuade him not to. (See previous entry.) There is some humor here, though. Back in April, when we ordered the sofa, we were told that we could expect it to arrive in 8-12 weeks. We found this funny because that took us through the end of June, which also happens to be our due date. And so we jokingly wondered, which will arrive first? The sofa or the baby? Ha ha. Dave was actually worried that we might miss the sofa delivery if the arrivals happened at the same time, but clearly that was not an issue.

Lo and behold, the sofa did arrive first, on Friday. After sitting on a second-hand futon (which, I should add, has served us well) for three years, Dave is incredibly happy to have a much more comfortable seating option for watching TV, movies, sitting with his laptop, and writing blog posts….you get the picture. He thought my idea for a blog post would be funny, so he banged it out last night (in about 1/4 of the time I would have taken to write it.) However, due to my inadequate understanding of Dave’s advanced set up that connects blog posts to Twitter to Facebook, I didn’t realize that the headline “Our New Arrival” would get such instant and broad circulation, or that the headline would be published without the context of the post itself! So I apologize for the confusion and the disappointment. Believe me, we know how difficult the waiting is at this point!

- Nat

Our new arrival*

On Friday I came home and was really excited to meet our new arrival….the new couch! I’ve been sitting on the old futon for years now, and I had had enough. When we realized that we couldn’t buy a house immediately on arrival to the DC area, we decided to do the next best thing: buy a sofa. A really nice sofa too. So we’ve made some changes to accommodate this change in our household. No more eating on the couch. No more drinking on the couch. On the plus side I can stretch out fully on the couch, and it no longer hurts to sit down for longer than 10 minutes. This has been a drastic change for us, and I don’t think I can handle any more change in our lives right now. Good thing we don’t have any big changes coming, right? RIGHT?

* sorry, couldn’t resist

- Dave

Just added Twitter

I just added a Twitter plug-in to the blog. Every time I post something here, a Tweet will go out. I’ve also started a new blog located here: http://www.goldbergfam.info/blog dedicated to my more techie pursuits.

- Dave

Resourcefulness

A staple dish in our weekly rotation is our improvised pesto pasta. I think we first made pesto pasta sometime this winter, when I had a craving for a hot and tasty pasta dish. After consulting epicurious.com and a few cookbooks, we settled on making fresh pesto and roasted veggies to toss with pasta. Since then, we’ve made the dish at least twice a month, and it’s become one of Dave’s favorites! We even took a big bowl to some friends when they had a baby a few months ago. It was a big hit!

This past Tuesday night, we had pesto pasta on our weekly meal schedule. I thought we had picked up all the necessary ingredients during our weekly shop: basil, asparagus, zucchini. But when Dave started to pull out the ingredients to make the pesto, he discovered that we were missing a key component: pine nuts! We had polished off the bag of pine nuts the last time we made pesto! Neither of us really felt like running to the store to buy pine nuts, but we still needed to make something for dinner. In a moment of inspiration, I thought of walnut pesto. I’d always seen recipes in magazines and on blogs, and it always sounded so good. And, I knew we had walnuts! So I quickly found a recipe, and Dave threw the substitution into the food processor.

Lo and behold, I thought the walnut pesto was pretty tasty, and our dinner plans were saved, even though we didn’t have all the ingredients. Most satisfying for me, though, was the success of my resourcefulness in the kitchen.

- Nat