My blogging has seriously been falling off lately. I just don't have the mental energy to be creative when I get home.
This past week in the well baby nursery was fun. It was nice to be surrounded by healthy babies and their excited parents. It's amazing how aware a 12 hour old baby is -- they would often calm right down as soon as one of their parents walked over to the crib, especially if the baby could hear their voice. I was holding one of the babies and she was looking at the window and when I turned a little she craned her neck to keep looking at the window, with that look of perplexion (not a word) on her face. She was like 20 hours old! I don't think they're even supposed to be able to see that far. It was so amazing to watch them start to turn into little people.
The sad cases I saw had to do with the mothers, not the babies. One of the moms was just having bad complications from her C-section -- a lot of internal bleeding. She was stuck in the ICU for the first few days of her son's life. Oh, and that boy looked exactly like his dad, somehow, even though he was only a few days old and looked like a baby. Dad was so excited, doing the stereotypical thing of shaking the hand of everyone who walked in the room.
The other sad case was a mom who had been diagnosed with metastatic melanoma during her pregnancy. She needed surgery as soon as possible so they had to weigh the risks of waiting to operate on her cancer with the risks of her baby being born pre-term; they waited until she was 34 weeks along, just late pre-term. We send babies to the NICU if they weigh less than
2200 grams and he weighed in at 2210 grams, so he could stay with his mom in her room until they went home a few days later (probably earlier than the doctor would have liked, but he wanted them to get home and have as much time together as possible).
One interesting thing about the nursery at Christiana that I don't think I've mentioned is that almost every baby stays in the room with Mom, and Mom and Dad are responsible for feeding it and changing its diapers from day 1. Mom can have the baby sleep in bed with her if she really wants, although we don't recommend it. My attending said that this is pretty new, around for only the past 5 years or so, and it was totally new to me. Every time I've gone to visit a new baby, up to my cousin who was born just six year ago, the set up has been that the mom is in her room and all the babies are in one big nursery with a big window where you can point and find yours and ogle at it. This new system seems really nice, and I think the parents liked it too. There still were nurseries where the nurses could take the baby if Mom needed to get a shower or something, so it wasn't like they were totally on their own. Oh, and as of like this year, dads are allowed to stay the night in the room too... in an empty hospital bed or a chair... but nonetheless.
Tomorrow we start our three weeks at an outpatient clinic in Wilmington. We don't have to be there until 8:30am!!!!!! We don't get out until 5pm, but still, this is like a normal person's job. We are going to be so refreshed. Maybe we can even go to Quizzo this week!
Lastly, Glen and I are addicted to
Philly's 104.5FM. We first discovered this station when we got our car back from Glen's mom Kathee after she borrowed it for one night due to a debacle involving income taxes and a heavily armored parking garage; she had left the radio tuned to the station, although I don't think she particularly listens to it. We kept the radio tuned there and were amazed that every time we turned the car on, there was a good song on. Then with school and the boards, we hardly used our car for a few months. I tried to find the station in the house once, but I mistakenly thought it was 94.5FM. That's a Top 40 station out of Trenton, and as is requisite with getting older, I think pop music is getting worse and worse. So recently, Steve mentioned 104.5 and reminded me that (1) it existed and (2) what its real frequency was. So since we've been commuting in our car over this past week, we've needed a radio station as background noise and tuned in to this. It's all 90's alternative rock! It's amazing! These radio stations had slowly been getting canceled; it happened in Baltimore, Philly, and I've heard NY. There was almost nothing for people our age to listen to. On top of that, their DJs don't talk at all, even in the mornings - its all music. Their commercial breaks are only two commercials long. I wondered how they stayed in business, but I just found out they're run by ClearChannel, the super mega radio conglomerate. I don't really like supporting one of their stations, but you hardly have any choice these days anyway. (and it's a lot easier when they're playing what
I like, haha).
Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Temple Pilots, Weezer, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Live, U2... and some new stuff like White Stripes and the Killers... yum!
On the wedding news front, we may have a band picked out.
I've also starting getting into the idea of asking couples to list their own first dance song on the RSVP card. This might make the reception more personal, and encourage people to get up to dance. However, if the band can't play it or the DJ doesn't have it, I wouldn't want the couple to feel neglected.
The Oregon Trail.
