Spooning

Privacy PLEASE! Can't you see Mr. McBearenstein and I are having some "together time"?!

Mr. McBearenstein...roll over, you're snoring!

Don't you just love her little side wrinkles? She's so out of it during belly time, she doesn't even care what her hair looks like. There's some serious bead-head action going on!

Piggy Peanut

Widdle Biddy Toes! Wanna see them a little closer...ENHANCE!! (props to Cute Overload on that one)

I'm badly in need of a manicure. :)

Peanut has been a giant piggy that past few days. She's now up to 3 lbs. 2 oz! It's unreal. She's up to 21 ml of milk, and will be on full feeds tomorrow I'm guessing. She's completely off of the TPN, which is a blessing for her liver. Her PICC line has been removed since she no longer gets those fluids and if she needs medication, it will go in her feeding tube. She now has both arms and hands completely free to grasp tubes and wave her hands wildly in the air! She's hovering around 53% oxygen, still bouncing up and down with her oxygenation...she'll be 80 one second...then 97 the next.

We will be celebrating a double birthday this Wednesday...Tim will be a quarter century old, and Peanut will be 6 weeks (32 weeks adjusted). A father-daughter birthday bash!

Bedside Art

This monogrammed blog is brought to you by Pretty Peanut, Inc.

Was busy by Madeleine's bedside making little artsy things yesterday. I was a bit "blocked" and I rarely get artist's block...it's more like artist's freeze...like an old typewriter when the keys all go at the same time and get locked together. Since Peanut is my inspiration, working on her initials or drawing a peanut usually gets things moving. After her initials, I went back to bird land.
This is the kind of tree I'd like to paint in her room, a sumi-e inspired Japanese cherry blossom.

It's 10:30 am and I haven't been to see the Peanut yet because I've been cleaning the house all morning. When I called, she'd had a good night, her blood gases had been steady and she was in the 50% range on her oxygen and tolerating feeds well still. Good news like that chills me out and allows me to feel ok about being home doing things, but it only takes a few hours and I'm antsy to leave. I've never wanted to be at a hospital so much in my life! It's a good thing that I've gotten over that whole "throwing up in hospitals" thing I used to do!

*Update 8pm*
Peanut is holding steady and doing well. I spent all day with her giving her "touchies" in her isolette. Her blood gas this afternoon was good, she's up to 19 ml of milk now with fortifier in it. More calories! I changed her diaper and helped to reposition her for tummy time. She woke up right as she was put on her tummy so she squirmed for 10 minutes with her eyes wide open and was desatting. As soon as she snoozed off into dream land...she was sat'n hi once more! Good Peanut.

What goes in...

And now...the moment you've all been waiting for. Fresh from the babe...not her first performance, but definitely one of the BEST!

POOP!

Madeleine says, "There's definitely more room on the outside than there is on the inside!"
So...the nurse and I were changing her diaper together, it's hard to reach the other side of the babe in the isolette so it's good to have a pair of hands on both sides. I unlatched the diaper and saw that she had a few little pieces of poo there...and the nurse goes, "Looks like she's still working on it..." and kinda pushes her legs back on her belly a little bit and that was just enough pressure to help her out with the situation! I really have never seen anything like it...truly. I will spare you the details...you can see the results for yourselves.

You have to admit, it's an interesting shape...no?! :) It was also funny today...Peanut had a very wet diaper and I asked her nurse if she can tell how much they weigh by just feeling them. She bet 26, I bet 27...it ended up being 34 ml. Sheesh. What a PEE-nut!

In other news...today Madeleine was 5 weeks old, that makes her about 30 weeks and a day (or two) old. We had her traditional Wednesday birthday party in the cafeteria. I have to say, I'm finally completely OVER the food there...except the cookies. Punkin is scheduled for an eye exam next week and after hearing how they do it...I will NOT be looking. Fortunately, I've been told it's very quick. I'm curious to see...just what she sees. She's still loving Mr. Servo i and in fact, they removed the oscillator from her bed space. She's at 18 ml of breast milk now and will be at full-feeds in a day or so. That means, bye-bye TPN. They already stopped her lipids and once she's at full-feeds, they will add fortifier to her milk to give it more calories. As soon as they know she can tolerate that...they will remove her PICC line. The less hoses and wires on my child...the sooner I can hold her! Their next problem will be...getting me to let go.

What a day in Peanutville!

Where do I begin? How about with a 2 lb 12.2 oz Peanut Pic?!

Peek-a-boo! See, she's ready to play!
Today was a very good day, but it still wore me out! Peanut is so relaxed and apparently happy on her new vent...but the not-so-good part was that her CO2 kept going up. They took her from 40 up to 50 breaths per minute and at the next check, it wasn't any better. It was in the mid-hi 70's. This earned her yet another new toy...a bigger breathing tube! She'd outgrown the old one. They told me that if a baby her size was admitted today, she would have a larger tube...and that basically the vent wasn't able to fully do it's job because air was escaping around the small tube in her big throat.

It seemed, as I asked questions, that this was a normal thing and that they did it all the time...so I said a prayer and stepped out for a sandwich knowing that Miss Madeleine is a tough little cookie and she always seems to do well with the things that sound the most intense. Being extubated, bagged and intubated...NO PROBLEM...peeing and pooping...CHALLENGING!
(Even though she's still doing those well at this time!) Here's a pic of Maddie's new friend, Mr. Servo i. You can see her other friends back there too...Mr. Nitric Oxide, who got turned down from 5 to 2.2 today and in a week, he will be an old friend that she doesn't hang out with anymore. Even farther back, Mr. Oscillator...hopefully they've played for the last time.

So today Peanut got a new ventilator, new tube and new neobar, white instead of yellow, and it doesn't pull her fat little face together like the old one. He CO2 is down from the 70's to the 50's now...that means it's good. :) You know what made me squeal (inside) with delight?? They said now I'll get to hold her soon! My Peanut!!!

I'll now leave you with the sleeping Peanut, snoozing right after her 13 ml of milk...the Perpetually Precious and Perfect, Pretty Princess of Power is hopefully dreaming of her Posh Purple Peanut Palace (that her mommy needs to PAINT!)...see you tomorrow, Madeleine Rose!

Hello Servo i

I'm so excited right now, it took me literally 6-8 times trying to sign in...first I typed "blogbot"...then realized I was typing a . instead of an @ symbol...then I had the numbers wrong (it's her birthday, duh!)...then forgot to add the middle name...then realized it wasn't "blogbot" or even "blogspot"...but gmail! Typing fast while excited could have gotten me locked out of my account...good thing I'm not this excited when logging into my bank account these days!

Anyway...it's a lot quieter around the NICU today because Miss Madeleine is on a Servo i venitlator and off of the oscillator! They decided this in the last hour or so because I just called on Peanut not too long ago. They said since she was fighting the vent and more awake...it was time to graduate. Now, it assists her, but allows her to breath comfortably over it if she wants without struggling! Can you see my happy dance?! They're going to watch her closely and keep checking her stats...she's at 40 pressure now, and they an go up to 60 if they need to...and if she has issues, she can go back on the oscillator but lets pray she stays on this one. Yay! More info soon.

By the way, Happy Birthday Mr. G!

Hands On

The past few days, I've just happened to look into Peanut's isolette to check her out and have noticed her doing strange things that really weren't "registering" on the monitor. Yesterday, with her flailing episode...and now today I just got the urge to look at her and noticed her "breathing" hard. Her chest was going in and out, and she was slightly gasping for air...and wasn't vibrating from her vent. I called the nurse over and she got a RT and started moving her breathing tube...she finally stopped gasping and started vibrating again, meaning the vent was working...but after that, she started to desat down to 69 and it took her a good 20-30 minutes to come back from this episode.

The hard part for me was...her monitor wasn't alarming, and she's got a cover over her. You can't hear or see her. The gasping for air is a new one for me...she's been doing different stuff the past few days and after today, I'm afraid to go home. Last night she looked good but her blood gas came back not so good...and they did an X-ray and saw that she had grown out of her tube again...so they pushed it in a little and she got better. Now I'm wondering if there's a certain way the tube should be positioned so it doesn't get stuck or twisted, or whatever in the world it did today?! I don't know how the tube *should* be laying, so I don't know when it looks ok. I'm just afraid she'll be struggling for a long time without someone noticing and it will do her harm. Sure, her vent wasn't helping her out much and she was pretty much breathing on her own...but she still wasn't very good at it...she was struggling. That's a lot of breathing to do all by yourself all at once!

She's going to the bathroom quite well still and they've moved her feeds up to 9 ml, and will increase them by 2 ml every 12 hours until they're at full feeds, which I was told today is 26 ml...once she gets there she'll come off of her TPN and her liver will have an easier time since the TPN can be hard on it. And, she was borderline ready for a platelet transfusion, and her platelets actually went up, so that means she's making them. Good. Every time she gets transfused she puffs up like a croissant and has to have a diuretic to pee off all the water weight...

She got flipped on her belly before I left this afternoon, and was being fed...and was instantly very still and comfortable looking, as always with belly time. I felt ok to leave but now I'm antsy here at home, even worse than before! But I have to clean the house sometime...

Peanutville

Remember that Madeleine L'Engle book, "A Wrinkle in Time"? That concept of time 'buckling' and allowing you to step off the line of time from one spot to another...that's been happening a lot to me lately. If I could sit back and say..."What's next?"...this is what I see.
Know what this is? Madeleine's future Peanut Palace! It used to be my bead and sewing room and it's connected to our bedroom via a pocket door (shown in top picture). 2 of the walls are white, and two are deep red...the ceiling has wallpaper on it, at least 3 layers when concidering what the rest of the house has had (some places 5 layers). It's ok, it's so old and crusty, it comes off in a sheet when faced with my wallpaper steamer. Best $50 I've ever spent on the house. The floor is dark, painted around the edges and covered with a sticky layer of residue from the tar paper that was under the linoleum. Basically, it's gross.

Peanut, through her powers of mental telepathy, has told me that she would like a bright, yet rich lavender colored room and she wants her daddy to sand the floors and make them nice and light. She also desires something fun on the ceiling to look at...a blue sky with clouds...wispy ones, not cartoony and boring. A tree on one wall was also a thought...some gauzy curtains with darker ones too for sleeping during the day...and last she was thinking a rug would be nice since her mommy's feet get so cold in the winter...no telepathy there, she heard all about it this winter!

Basically, to avoid that wrinkle in time that I feel so rapidly approaching, I need to get busy.

Wild Girl

Do I look confused? Maybe not since this was just before Madeleine woke up, eyes wide open, breathing over the vent and started kicking her arms and legs around like she was trying to swim. I changed her diaper, it was full of pee and a pile of little yellowish "seed" things that when one of the nurses saw them, asked if she was being fed breast milk. Yes! So that mystery is cleared up.

Ten minutes later, she's STILL flailing and making "cry" faces and eyes wide open...I was a little more than freaked out by this point since I'd never seen her this active, and this WILD. She had yet another diaper change (15 mins. had passed) ...more pee and poo. Lovely! STILL didn't calm her down! Then, her nurse fed her, unswaddled her (she was warm...NOW I know...) flipped her on her belly and she was instantly calm. *sigh*. BUT...now she uses the little roll at the end of her bed to push her bottom way up in the air and stick her tongue all the way out.

I've never been around babies, ever. Especially not one this small...and have never seen the signs or watched the changes they go through. She's been through a lot and I worry about her. I'm the only one that seemed to be concerned today...she just went from "sleep all day" to "WOOHOO!" in half a day's time. The crying faces, the eyes wide open looking around like she's lost, the flailing...she's in that box and I don't really know what to do to help her. She was wilder today than when they sedated her a few days back...that confused me.

After talking to the charge nurse, she explained that the hydrocortisone she's getting could be giving her this burst of energy, or she could just be feeling so much better after peeing off some of that fluid she's been retaining. I'm just not good yet at discerning the signs and stringing them altogether.


She looks so good to me though...she's filling out and her skin is a beautiful, even tone...she's my Pretty Peanut Princess of Power. She's now sleeping soundly with her arm wrapped around her little bear blanket (suddenly, he's ok to touch now...they must have kissed and made up) This sure is a crash course in BABY! I missed Baby 101 and went right to the master's program. God doesn't send us anything we can't handle...right?!

Puffy Peanut

Dark and warm, a good place to grow mushrooms...and Peanuts! Madeleine's Peanut Palace has been covered like this for a few weeks...she likes it dark, the way it's supposed to be in her world right now.

Madeleine has been retaining water the past few days. There's a few reasons why she could be doing this, all too complicated (even though probably fairly simple) for me to explain right now since my brain is a little "dull" this evening. She's not peeing as well as she once was...her body is growing and metabolism changing. They've been weening her vent settings frequently and then had to go back one today...it's like when you give a good pull to the toilet paper and sometimes more comes off the roll than you need and you have roll it back a bit! Kinda like that.

I'm getting a little jealous but being ultimately patient...at any given moment I can turn any direction and see a mom holding her baby all connected to tubes and wires. I have to settle for holding my hands on her head and legs. She doesn't like her back touched, it probably tickles or just doesn't feel great. Her skin is soft like silk and she's warm and smells sweet. Can't wait to get my hands all over that sweet punkin muffin of love!