Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

If you’re following the blog closely you’ll note that I said yesterday we usually swaddle Toren to put him down to sleep.  With his arms out, he usually wakes himself up.  That is, generally, true.  But that is also not the way Toren thinks about it.

We’ve noticed a pattern: Whenever I’m holding him to put him to sleep, once he starts to get a little grumpy, I swaddle him then hold him.  He will usually struggle for anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes, wiggling and crying, then fall asleep.  If Debi is holding him, he pretends to be hungry, rooting all over and sucking on anything he can get near his mouth for about 2 to 10 minutes, then he falls asleep.  I guess we should hope that our child is able to tell us apart at this point, but it does seem like he’s trying to manipulate us.

He also plays a game now.  He’ll fall asleep swaddled, but if he wakes up after we put him down, he’ll immediately wiggle until he gets his arms free (or tries for a while until he realizes we swaddled him tight enough that he can’t).  Sometimes he’s able to sleep with his arms free; other times he flails them all over, keeping himself up.  He’ll then whimper until we come tie him up again.  In the photo above it looks as though he tied them up himself by laying on them!

We swaddle Toren most of the time when we put him down to sleep.  It seems to really keep him calm.  If we don’t, he has a tendency to flail his arms and legs, waking himself up.  I walked into his room the other day to find him like this:

Toren pretending to be Darth Vader

My Mom has already told me to stop comparing Toren to aliens, as he’s much cuter than they are (she’s right, of course), but I couldn’t help thinking that he looked like Darth Vader unmasked:

Darth Vader unmasked

So, clearly he isn’t as pasty white nor does he have the scars, but that’s what I thought when I saw him.  Maybe it’s the bald, rounded head?

And of course there is the issue of whether the human-like characters in Star Wars are actually humans or aliens.  Since I’m not a Star Wars buff (Star Trek all the way, baby!), I’m not going to comment only to say that this is at least a comparison with a clearly human-like alien this time.  Sorry Mom!

Toren lounging in his bassinet

When your child’s able to stretch his arms from one side of his bassinet to the other, is it time to switch to a crib?

I’ve been using Google Health to track Toren’s immunizations and other medical stuff (e.g., circumcision, doctor’s visits, etc.).  As I entered Toren’s updated height and weight information into Google Health, it generated a Body Mass Index score for him: 16.4.  Not remembering what that means, I visited Wikipedia to see how Toren’s BMI suggests he is doing.  According to the initial table you see on Wikipedia, a BMI below 16.5 is “severely underweight”!!

I laughed, of course, because this is what Toren looks like now:

Toren's double chin

Toren's sexy belly!

The BMI table in that section is for adults.  The section just below notes that those BMI calculations don’t apply to kids.  Toren, of course, is not severely underweight.  It just gave Debi and I a good laugh to think our increasingly chunky little boy is underweight.

One of the ideas I talk about every semester in my Introduction to Sociology classes is the declining birth rate in developed countries.  There are several factors that help explain the low birth rates, but one of them is the cost of children.  In agricultural communities, children can be a net positive for parents – they can be put to work on the ranch or farm to make the parents money.  But for most parents in developed countries, children simply cost money, lots of money.  I’ve seen various estimates, but most put the cost of raising a middle-class child to the age of 18 at around $250,000.  Because I consciously think about things like this, I will admit that it factored into our decision to only have 1 child; we can’t afford any more children.  So, I have a pretty good sense of how much Toren will cost us to raise.

But what I didn’t know is how much Toren would cost from conception to delivery.  I’ve spoken with several people who said that it was a $15.00 co-pay for their child.  Wow!  Lucky them!  Toren wasn’t nearly so cheap.  I tracked every single expense we had with Toren to get a sense of how much he actually cost to deliver.  Keep in mind, I have insurance through my work and I think it’s decent insurance – not the best, of course, but decent.  Here’s the rundown of expenses:

• amount billed by insurance – $26,798.17
• amount allowed by insurance – $19,565.21
  • insurance discount – 36.72%
• amount paid by insurance – $13,802.83
• amount we paid – $5,762.38

Now, keep in mind that both Debi and I have a debit card through our insurance plans that receives money every month to pay for medical expenses.  We used both of our cards to pay as much of the $5,762.38 that we could, but still ended up basically writing a check for about $2,000 when all was said and done.

If you want to see the actual expenses in spreadsheet form, you can download my spreadsheet here.

This illustrates some rather interesting points.  First, the fact that we have insurance means we only paid about 9% of the total amount billed us for the pregnancy and delivery.  There was a 36% discount off the top for having insurance, the insurance covered about 45% of the bill, our debit cards covered about 10%, leaving us with 9% to pay out-of-pocket.  If you didn’t have health insurance, rather than having to pay the $2,000 or so we did, we would have had to pay $26,800.  No wonder the single biggest cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical bills.  If you don’t have insurance I have no idea how you could afford to have a child.

The second point is – Wow!  It costs $27,000.00 to have a child?  The Obama Administration is currently trying to reign in the cost of healthcare in the US.  I’m certainly not lamenting the high quality of care we received – having a neonatologist on-hand when Toren was born very well may have saved his life.  And having an emergency C-section may very well have saved both his and Debi’s lives.  So, I’m not complaining.  But I wonder how much this would cost in other countries?