Sylvia Rose: Unofficial announcement & progress report

I guess it was predictable that I would have failed to blog sooner or even email out pictures. It seemed like word & photos were making it around, though, so I figured it was probably OK, and I figure people will forgive me (which I appreciate)...

But onto the important stuff!!

Sylvia Rose was born at 10:06PM on July 27, 2009.

She didn't cry at all when she was first born, so the hospital people kept her on a heating table while they poked at her. She still wouldn't cry, but she was looking around and moving and making faces and otherwise doing so well that they gave up and let us hold her for a while before they took her away to the nursery for the full set of tests and treatments and things.

They weighed and measured her in the nursery, and she was 19 inches, 7 pounds 3 ounces, and totally perfect. She was checked out by a doctor from her pediatrician's office when she was about 12 hours old, and he said that she was "officially perfect". So there you have it: One out of one doctors agree, Sylvia Rose is officially perfect!


She only went down to about 6 pounds, 15 ounces while we were at the hospital. While we were there, many of the hospital staff commented on how good she was. She didn't give the nurses who had to check her out a hard time, and she was generally very sweet and calm.

We spent 2 nights at the hospital and came home on Wednesday. At the hospital, we weren't allowed to dress her in anything other than the hospital clothes, so we were super excited to get to dress her in her going-home outfit. We weren't sure whether she would fit in "newborn" clothes or "0-3" clothes, so we brought both. We dressed her in a newborn outfit and it was comically over-sized.


She made the transition home like a champ and still has an incredibly sweet disposition. She still doesn't cry very much, which may change when she starts spending more time awake. We made our first migration to her pediatrician's office this morning, and he said she was doing great (which I assume is meant as an additional qualification on top of already being "perfect" and not a down-grade). He says that she is not jaundiced and that we do not have to worry about it anymore because if she has not gotten jaundiced by day 4 then she won't. She also has already started rebounding and gaining weight back from the initial drop, which is ahead of schedule. So, she's doing great! We're tired and still in a certain amount of disbelief -- reality will probably settle in sometime in the next 18 years or so, right? -- but we're also totally delighted!

Here are a ton of pictures:
I think I'll be posting pictures and completely unbiased reports of how adorable and generally awesome she is again soon and often!

Full Term and Still Kickin'

...but before that, our families joined forces to throw the little Sprogster another excellent party:

She got a bunch of adorable, fun, and useful stuff!









She's one lucky fetus! And she's doing just fine. She's made it all the way to full term without any hiccups (except the literal ones, which she seems to get a lot), and her due date is coming up in just 2 short weeks. We continue to make efforts to prepare for her arrival, including shopping, cleaning, organizing, and plenty of relaxing! We've also both been crocheting blankets for the little one:



We've also been keeping busy with other things while we wait for the little one to decide when to make her appearance. We submitted a paper for publication, and then worked hard to edit and re-submit it after some very positive feedback. We've also been BabySitters Extraordinaire, watching Kurt for long stretches of time while his parents moved apartments, and actually double-babysitting for a few hours for Kurt & Elise. Man are those kids cute!











And they sure seem to like Max!





So that's us! And here's an obligatory picture of me & Sprog at ~8.5 months pregnant:



P.S. I got a haircut!

the Alien Inside

Well, the Sprogster keeps on growing and growing, as do I:

She's not even born yet, but she already has friends...
  

...and so much stuff!
  

She's even had her first party...

...thrown for her by the excellent Niehaus family...

...and she did very well for herself!

 

 

We're only about 2 months away from her expected due date, and I've become basically useless for much more than gestating and watching television.  Everything's going well, though.  At her last ultrasound everything looked good and she's continuing to grow at a good rate, so we probably won't have any more ultrasounds.  It's a shame, too, because she is so active these days, it'd be neat to get to feel her moving around and see what she was actually doing at the same time.  

She really does make her presence known these days.  She's as fidgety as her parents, always stretching or rolling around from side-to-side.  It's usually just little kicks or punches, but sometimes it seems like she's trying to burst out Alien-style.  Check this out:

  

(Anything but the flat rise-and-fall of me breathing is all her.)

She's unpredictable, but the two things that usually seem to persuade her to move are caffeine and when Max asks her to... it seems that she's already a daddy's girl.

Wow

That's all.... just... wow.

fetus factoids

It's hard to get any work (or play) done while I'm sitting by watching files transfer from my backup drive back onto my computer. [My computer crashed, and I had to reformat, and setting my computer back up is a slow, tedious process.] So I figured I'd take this opportunity to share some random factoids...

--I'm about half way through my pregnancy! When my good friend Jayne was pregnant, I made a big deal of how great it was when she was half way through because pregnancy SUCKS. I have to admit that now that it's me who's half way through, I'm mostly just freaked out. I look back at the first half of this pregnancy, and that really doesn't seem like enough time to get ready for everything.

--We haven't settled on a name for the baby, but I've always liked the idea of having a fetus name. For a little while, it was "the troll" because that's what she looked like on the first ultrasound, but I didn't like that much -- it sounded like the kind of thing that kids hate their parents for. More recently, I teased Max that I wanted to name the baby 'Sprog' and was deeply amused by the look of horror on his face. Since then, Sprog has become our baby's fetus name.

I'm reminded of All My Children (which I watch). One of the characters called her baby Spike while she was pregnant and talked about how she needed to find a real name for him. But after months of calling him Spike, that was just HIS NAME. I don't think this will happen with Sprog...

--I may have started feeling the baby move this past week. It's a pretty weird feeling. Max is really looking forward to the point when he can feel the baby moving from the outside, but so far it's all internal (and possibly just hallucinations anyway).

--I'm definitely starting to show, but I haven't been putting on much weight and apparently taller people tend not to pop out as much -- if you have a longer torso, the baby has more height to spread out and doesn't need to stick out as far. So I don't really look that different -- maybe a little chubbier.

--I've been surprised at how much being pregnant affects everything even in spite of the fact that I'm not that much bigger or heavier. There are weird pains and I'm just generally weaker and sore-er and it's harder to do things like sit down, stand up, roll over, or bend over to pick things up. I guess I always expected these things to be more proportionate to weight gain.

--I have NOT been having strange cravings. I generally just have less of an appetite. I do often want fried zucchini or Dorito's, but that was probably always true. My aversion to broccoli has returned to being almost as high as it ever was. Otherwise, nothing is all that strange.

--ADDENDUM: Some pregnant people miss booze & cigarettes. Not me. I miss Advil and Ativan!! I don't miss caffeine, either, but that's because I still drink coffee...

Ultrasound III

Technically, it's ultrasound IV but we didn't get pictures from the actual 3rd one, so we just won't count it!

The doctor said everything looked good, and confirmed that she's still a girl! He commented on her nice brain, which I think demonstrates that he understood the kind of people that Max & I are. He said that she's a good size and her brain ventricles and the chambers of her heart are perfect. He also commented on her "nice spine":



We got to see her rib cage, and we could see her little hands and feet moving around, which was pretty awesome. He has some fancy technology that lets him get a "4-D" image of her face. The first time he tried to use it, he could only get her profile. Fortunately the printer was jammed so he had to try again, and by then she had rolled over and we could get a pretty good view of her face:

Technology is so amazing! (And kind of creepy.)

Ultrasound II

So we had our second ultrasound today. The little one was upsidedown and facing my back, so we got this rather strange photo of a spine. You may be able to kind of get the idea that the head is at the bottom left and the "rump" is at the top right:



We also got this picture of a tiny little foot:



**SPOILER ALERT**

This last picture (which is totally cryptic to my eyes) apparently indicates to a professional that the little one is probably a girl!