I am SO EXHAUSTED so I’m going to keep this short. BabyBug had a couple of OT sessions this week and they are working on some new skills, including cause and effect. They linked her little plastic rings to hang off the mobile and then let her pull on them so she can see that when she pulls, the mobile moves. We need to get her some more toys that react when she does something to them. She is so fascinated by it. She is playing more with the rings while she is in her vibrating seat. She still manages to get them onto her wrists but now she is trying to put them in her mouth as well. And those tiny fingers are days away from being nommed by tiny baby lips.

Not much else to update. Mama is still a bit of a zombie. Tomorrow I will try solid food for the first time since surgery. Yikes.

Sweet face

OMGCOOL

Sillie Jo!

Hi Cathy!

EmoBaby drifts off to sleep. Check out her bangles.

She loves her Mommy!

BabyBug’s first Shabbat candles! (LED FTW!)

Let me just get the Mama update out of the way: Surgery seemed to go well. It will still be a little while before we know whether or not it actually worked; I need to heal first and can’t just dive face-first into a giant plate of chocolate cake (as fun as that sounds). My surgery was Monday morning, and by about noon today I was ready to head out. If I didn’t have a baby to get back to I probably would have stayed one more day, but I do, so I didn’t. In case you were wondering, my meals in the hospital consisted of heavily-salted broth, decaf coffee, generic Jell-O, and vanilla soy milk. Cream of Wheat for breakfast. Very exciting. The surgeon said I can experiment with solid foods starting over the weekend but not before then. Here’s hoping for some sort of positive change!! In the mean time, let’s just scrape by with as little pain as possible so I don’t completely lose the next few days in a Percocet haze.

Not too much on the LeahBug update front. The dietitian wants to start fortifying the breast milk again, but this time it would just be pure whey protein powder and not baby formula with unpronounceable mystery ingredients. We’ll have to decide on that in the next couple of days but I think pure protein powder is better than formula, at least. Speaking of nummy protein… Leah has fiiiiinally discovered that fingers can go in mouths. She’s still working on the whole thumb-sucking arrangement, but she’s managed to nom on her fingers a few times. I knew she would catch on eventually!

I had a lot of spare time in the car today (thanks again for shlepping me around, Dad!!!) so I started tweeting at some of my favorite folks on Twitter in the hope that they would retweet and get the word out about Leah’s story and our GoFundMe page. Look who answered our call:

How freaking cool is that? Thank you, Jane Espenson and Amber Benson!!!

If you are on Twitter, will you please retweet their posts?

And finally, I certainly can’t post pictures on the blog without posting BabyBug’s sweet little face, so here you go:

We are SO CLOSE!

Almost a smile…

Sweet baby-doll! Look at that tiny tongue! We need to figure out a way to keep it inside that tiny mouth. Any suggestions, speech-path posse?

Now it is time for me to sleep. Forgive me if I don’t remember any of this in the morning. :-/

BabyBug had a big day today! Aunti Staci and Grandpa Mannie came over in the morning, and Aunti Staci proved that she can’t be left alone with Mama Lisa’s phone. I really should have known better – any phone that winds up in her little hands generally returns to its owner with a background picture of Aunti Staci. Oy vey. Sneaki Aunti!!!

A little while after Staci and Grandpa arrived, Leah got to meet her cousins Phyllis and Roy and one of their daughters, Marci. It was a nice little reunion; Phyllis is my grandpa’s niece and they hadn’t seen each other in years and years. If you’re reading, it was absolutely awesome to see you guys and I hope you had a nice visit. Please definitely let us know next time you’ll be in our neck of the woods. And Marci, there’s a pair of bitty babyfeet waiting for you in the PICU whenever you want to come visit again. 🙂

After our cousins left, my sister and grandpa stayed to visit for a bit and then headed home as well. Shortly thereafter began another round of visits; Gran came over, followed by friends Cheryl and Gary. After they left, Gran chilled with LeahBug while Mommy graded some papers and Mama got some stuff done on the computer. Eventually things settled down and we got back to Mommy+Mama+Baby time, which is a fancy way of saying that Mama and Mommy spent a couple of hours dancing and singing and bouncing and rocking and patting and petting (and Lasix-diaper-changing) to get a BabyBug to sleep. She would fall asleep in our arms and then morph into Ms. ScrunchyFace the minute we put her down. We were finally able to get her to sleep in her bed a little earlier this evening and managed to get in one episode of “Breaking Bad.” We are trying to catch up on the current season before somebody goes and spoils it for us on Facebook like they did with the season finale of “True Blood.” Not cool!!!! We’re watching it with headphones so that our child doesn’t come out of the PICU with a little bit too much knowledge for her own good. Just finished the second episode.

Other than that, there’s not too much to report. Leah’s still hovering around 9.5 lbs and her g-tube site is looking good, though they’re still doing silver nitrate every few days, as needed, to keep the granulation tissue under control. She just needs to grow grow grow, and keep from aspirating! Mama Lisa has her surgery on Monday and will be in the hospital for a few days. I had my pre-op appointment on Friday and at some point I remarked that I had never spent a night in the hospital. Then I had to pause for a moment, think about how silly that sounded, and clarify that I had never spent a night in the hospital as a patient. Oy vey.

In other news, Leah’s nurse tonight is a Buffy fan and loves Dar Williams AND Raining Jane. Coooooooool.

And now, what you’ve really been waiting for: Pictures!

Yes, this happened.

Supah-Stah says, “Fan me with palm fronds!”

This face!

No, wait – THIS face!

THIS FOOT! We’re practicing for our debut as a Rockette.

“OH HI GRANDPA MANNIE!!!!”

Mama and Baby and Grandpa, oh my!

“HI MAMAAAA!”

Grandpa can’t take his eyes off BabyPie!

She was so comfy on his lap!

Staci goes for cutesie, Leah goes for emo

Leah is making plans

“Aunti Staci, do you see what these people put on me today? So humiliating.” And yet SO CUTE.

Cousins Phyllis and Marci and Aunti Staci and Grandpa Mannie. I think cousin Marci might be about to abscond with a babyfoot.

Cousin Phyllis snuggling a baby!

“Oh hai, Cheryl! I like your dress! Does it come in size 3 mo?”

Leah had some very special visitors today so there are more pics coming later, but here are pics from the past few days!

“Gran, what did you just do to my hair??? OMG, now you’re taking a picture?”

“Oh come on. You can’t be serious about these socks.”

Does it get any sweeter than this?

Oh. Maybe it does.

Aunti Staci, did we do it right? I threw in duck-lips and everything!

Um, hey, Leah? We’re taking a selfie here! Yawn on your own time!

“Mommy, let me just tell you…”

Always her favorite spot.

Sorry for the delay! LeahBug has been a little bit fussy the past couple of days as it is time for her four-month vaccines. We had them spread out over a few days so as not to slam her little body with so much in one huge shot, but that didn’t stop her from spiking a little fever yesterday. It was only 99.5 degrees, but I could tell she was working up a fever even when her temp was reading at 98.3 and then 98.7. Isn’t that weird? I was saying all afternoon that she felt warmer than usual. Maybe she takes after her mama and runs a low body temperature. She was fine today though, fever-wise, though she slept through most of the day. She did cough out her tube 3 different times and also yanked it off once, tape and all. Baby: 4. Repogle: 0.

In the afternoon. Leah woke up to visit with her Mama’s bestie, Auntie Z, while Mama played outside with Z’s baby RyRy. The plan had been for Gran to watch RyRy while Z visited with Leah and me, but I got a phone call this morning from the ER downstairs informing me that Ms. Gran had fallen and potentially broken her wrist. Oh no! As it turns out, yes, Gran has an impacted fracture in her wrist. They had to put her arm in some sort of torture device to straighten it out for splinting. Owwwwww.

There is a really long hallway on the way upstairs to PICU, and I always joke that I really want to roller-skate down that hallway. Many folks respond that they would probably break a bone if they tried, and I point out that if you have to fall, what better place than a hospital hallway where you’re already 50 feet from the emergency room? But dear Gran, I didn’t ask for a volunteer demonstration!! We are very glad it was just the wrist and not something bigger and more serious, but it still completely sucks and we hope it heals quickly and that they don’t need to operate. Feel better soon!!!

Auntie Z holds BabyBug for the first time!

Not too much to update, so I’ll mostly throw pictures at you. We had Gran stay with Leah on Friday so we could take a much-needed Mama Day, including a trip to the beach for our own little Tashlich, a Jewish custom performed during the High Holy Days. I can’t wait until we can bring Leah to see the ocean! She will be a great sand-castle architect. I just know it.

I spent Friday night and most of Saturday at Yom Kippur services, so I’ve been missing my BabyBug like crazy this weekend, even though I spent hours and hours with her after services yesterday. I’m running a BabyBug deficit. Need to balance that out with my sleep deficit. Today was better, though.

Like I said, there are not really any new updates for BabyBug. She’s growing, and her g-tube site is starting to look better. The tube is still clogging plenty, and she is still hacking up spitballs almost every day. Lately she has taken to coughing during her meals. It’s the oddest thing. We think perhaps she is salivating more from smelling the milk… but I’m also wondering if it’s possible that she’s experiencing reflux and some sort of muscle reflex is being triggered to make her cough or gag even though there is no connection between her stomach and her esophagus that would allow her to spit up.

In Mama news… I have my surgery a week from tomorrow. Keeping fingers crossed that it helps. 

Quite possibly the cutest SleepyBug yet.

This is what happens when our nurse puts a towel over our hair so we don’t get cold while we’re getting dressed. Hehe.

I had to tear myself away from this face yesterday morning to go to Yom Kippur services. With all of my health issues I’ve been ordered by my doc not to fast completely, but I managed to get through the holiday on one bottle of Ensure. But hey – I’ve had days where I consumed less (if you deduct calories up’n’out from calories in…) :-/

Mandy sent this photo to me while I was away. She made this dress!

Leah’s friends Jess and Wesley, who visited this past week. Who knew it was possible to get Leah to look at the camera at the same time as everyone else in the photo?

Working hard to hold our neck up to explore the tummy-time mat that  Jess and Wesley brought for her.

“OH HAI! LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!”

“Forget this! I’ll just eat my arm.”

Leah got all dressed up for a visit from her friends Linda and Eden this evening. She fell asleep pretty quickly, though, so we didn’t get a picture. 🙁 Next time!

Precious kiddo

Just a flash of cranky from Empress Baby. “Change my diaper!” “Feed me nummies!” “Flush my tube!” “Fan me with palm fronds!”

“ExCUSE me?” Our child can already raise a single eyebrow. This girl has ATTITUDE.

“You are a welcoming back from the ocean”

Tired Mommies

Mandy getting ready to rinse off seashells. She cleaned them and used them to make a little rattle for BabyBug. If we can’t bring her to the ocean we’ll bring the ocean to her!

As above, so below

Mandy’s masterpiece.

Today, Aunti Staci came to visit along with her childhood friend Sharona (above). Mama Lisa babysat for her a few times!

Later, we practiced visual tracking the 21st-century way – by taking selfies.

Never mind. THIS is the sweetest SleepyBug ever.

BabyBug can-can do the can-can. Then, she can-can have a poopsplosion, necessitating a bath and costume change.

“Tra la la, it’s my first time in a real bath tub!”

“You’re going to post this photo where? Now wait just one minute!”

“This hair! I will, I will, I WILL have my revenge!”

Humiliating hair right before it got fixed… but not before the next photo happened.

“MOMMY! This is  no better!”

Sitting up on our awesome new quilt from Kyra & Mike

Laying down on our awesome new quilt from Kyra and Mike

The tail end of a tantrum on our awesome new quilt from Kyra and Mike