I'm not much of a science fiction fan, but in a lot of sci-fi that I've encountered, one of the marks of "The Future" is some big change to the way we eat. Maybe we will take a pill in the morning that contains all of our day's nutritional needs or we'll be served some kind of uniform, generic food rather than meat, starch and vegetables. This idea has been around for a long time in sci fi but, aside from the existence of some really over-processed stuff (e.g., Go-gurt), food and eating haven't changed all that much.
Blaise, however, is living in a form of that future. She's on total parentral nutrition (TPN), meaning that she receives all of her calories and nutrients through an IV. She gets a little bit of breastmilk continuously pumped directly into her stomach as well, so her stomach is never empty. Technically, she doesn't need to eat. She's living that sci-fi dream. Still, she slurps down that teaspoon of milk every four hours and then goes looking for more. Which, by the way, is kind of how I behave with miniature Snickers bars. Sorry, sci-fi visionaries, people really like eating. (Duh.)
She had another pretty good day today. They increased the amount that is being continuously pumped into her stomach. We'll see if that holds or if they decide to back off again. She may have hit a bit of a ceiling on that front, but that doesn't mean that ceiling is a permanent one. If they back off, we'll try again in a few days. I'll try to fit in another photo shoot tomorrow, maybe this time in an outfit that's not pink.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
New Videos: Somehow even cuter than before
I'm just now uploading a bunch of new videos to the "Shared Stuff" page linked from here. More outfits, more funny faces, and ~100g more Blaise!
As always, may take them a bit to go live. The "Wireless Hotspot" here in the hospital cafeteria is decidedly lukewarm today.
As always, may take them a bit to go live. The "Wireless Hotspot" here in the hospital cafeteria is decidedly lukewarm today.
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Tale of the Tape
This will be a pretty short entry, but Blaise hit two milestones that we're very happy about and we wanted to tell everybody about them.
First of all, as of today she's 36 gestational weeks old. She continues to expand her repertoire of funny faces, and continues to get better at self-soothing, eye contact, and even some visual tracking (I think...haven't really tested her the right way yet).
Second, Blaise now weighs over 4 pounds! Still sounds small compared to our friends' babies, but she's up over her birth weight now, which is great. Newborns always lose some weight just after they're born and Blaise lost a good bit extra due to her surgery. She's been steadily catching back up though, and we're hoping she can keep that going. One of her nurses pointed out that usually one doesn't talk about a lady's weight in such detail, to which I could only reply "That's no lady, that's my daughter." Still too early to tell if Blaise appreciated the joke.
In other developments, her bed is now adorned with some nice high-contrast pictures for her to look at and her head is also now adorned with a pink bow. We're still not sure what we think about the bow, but it was nice of whichever nurse put it there to think of her. It's unclear what it's stuck to her head with (ostomy paste? duoderm?) but it's stayed put for a full day now. Time will tell.
First of all, as of today she's 36 gestational weeks old. She continues to expand her repertoire of funny faces, and continues to get better at self-soothing, eye contact, and even some visual tracking (I think...haven't really tested her the right way yet).
Second, Blaise now weighs over 4 pounds! Still sounds small compared to our friends' babies, but she's up over her birth weight now, which is great. Newborns always lose some weight just after they're born and Blaise lost a good bit extra due to her surgery. She's been steadily catching back up though, and we're hoping she can keep that going. One of her nurses pointed out that usually one doesn't talk about a lady's weight in such detail, to which I could only reply "That's no lady, that's my daughter." Still too early to tell if Blaise appreciated the joke.
In other developments, her bed is now adorned with some nice high-contrast pictures for her to look at and her head is also now adorned with a pink bow. We're still not sure what we think about the bow, but it was nice of whichever nurse put it there to think of her. It's unclear what it's stuck to her head with (ostomy paste? duoderm?) but it's stayed put for a full day now. Time will tell.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Great Discoveries
In a week where people are tossing the word "historic" around a lot, I've been thinking about the great discoveries of history: the New World, penicillin, pulsars. And in the same spirit of exploration that led to these historic discoveries, Blaise has discovered her own thumb!
This is a great discovery in my book because she tends to spit out her pacifier and then be consumed by The Rage. Of course, I'll be trying to break her of this in a few years, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
In other news, Blaise is gaining weight beautifully, at a rate of nearly an ounce a day, and the nutritionists seem quite pleased with her progress on that front. She's also absorbing at least some of the milk that she's getting from her enteral and oral feedings, which is a good sign in terms of the functionality of her remaining bowel. We'll try to get some more photos up soon so you can see just how much she's growing. She was destined for chubby cheeks (just look at her parents) and they're starting to appear.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Blaise got mail!
Today Blaise received her first piece of mail, which was even stamped with the words "Official Business" to make it even more impressive. While we haven't opened it yet, it's almost certainly her Social Security card. In the grand scheme of things, this is really just one of those small-but-important formalities that marks Blaise's entry into the world of bureaucracy, but I can't tell you how excited I am that the card arrived.
When Blaise was born, there was a lot of uncertainty about what might happen next and we were both pretty scared. For whatever reason, one thing I fixated on in that first day or two was all the paperwork that had her name on it. Neither one of us got to spend much time with her before she had to go to the OR and the speed with which everything happened left us in a recovery room by ourselves almost as soon as we'd been admitted. It was about the strangest feeling ever...we'd gone through a whirlwind of doctors and nurses, Erin had had surgery, we'd both met our daughter, and somehow we ended up just sitting in this room like nothing had happened. It really got to me, and so I memorized her medical record number, made about a dozen photocopies of the birth statement we got from Brigham & Women's hospital, and when they handed us the Social Security form I filled it out at light speed. A Social Security card means you're here and you're in the system. I wanted Blaise to have a record on file with someone who wasn't a doctor and who'd list her with her own name instead of "Baby Girl."
Anyhow, today we had another good day of resting and relaxing and tomorrow we'll show her her first letter and open it together. I'm not as desperate for an official marker of her existence as I was then, but I'm still excited to see the letter. In a similar vein (and since the inauguration was today), Erin's also been planning to file for our official letter from President Obama, congratulating Blaise on her arrival. Turns out all you need to do is write to the White House Greeting Office with the details of your child's birth, and they'll send along what's supposed to be a very nice letter to your baby from the President. Pretty cool, and we're both excited that she'll get her letter from Barack Obama. A friend of ours joked today that Blaise may have been born early out of sheer excitement for the inauguration ceremony (which she unfortunately had to miss, being in the NICU and all), so hopefully she'll think it's a neat thing to have when she's older.
When Blaise was born, there was a lot of uncertainty about what might happen next and we were both pretty scared. For whatever reason, one thing I fixated on in that first day or two was all the paperwork that had her name on it. Neither one of us got to spend much time with her before she had to go to the OR and the speed with which everything happened left us in a recovery room by ourselves almost as soon as we'd been admitted. It was about the strangest feeling ever...we'd gone through a whirlwind of doctors and nurses, Erin had had surgery, we'd both met our daughter, and somehow we ended up just sitting in this room like nothing had happened. It really got to me, and so I memorized her medical record number, made about a dozen photocopies of the birth statement we got from Brigham & Women's hospital, and when they handed us the Social Security form I filled it out at light speed. A Social Security card means you're here and you're in the system. I wanted Blaise to have a record on file with someone who wasn't a doctor and who'd list her with her own name instead of "Baby Girl."
Anyhow, today we had another good day of resting and relaxing and tomorrow we'll show her her first letter and open it together. I'm not as desperate for an official marker of her existence as I was then, but I'm still excited to see the letter. In a similar vein (and since the inauguration was today), Erin's also been planning to file for our official letter from President Obama, congratulating Blaise on her arrival. Turns out all you need to do is write to the White House Greeting Office with the details of your child's birth, and they'll send along what's supposed to be a very nice letter to your baby from the President. Pretty cool, and we're both excited that she'll get her letter from Barack Obama. A friend of ours joked today that Blaise may have been born early out of sheer excitement for the inauguration ceremony (which she unfortunately had to miss, being in the NICU and all), so hopefully she'll think it's a neat thing to have when she's older.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Blaise Ursula
Today was a calm day for Blaise. No real changes to any of her feeding amounts or schedules, no new medications, and a lot of nap-time while being held by Mom and Dad. Since there's not a lot to report on the medical/surgical front, I thought I'd take a second to write about her name.
I actually overheard her day nurse briefing the night crew on Blaise's condition, and at the first mention of her name, the new nurse interrupted right away:
"What?"
"Blaise. Blaise Conwell."
"How do you spell that?"
"B-L-A-I-S-E."
"Oh. Hunh."
Most of the reactions we've heard have been really positive (though those are only the ones that we've heard). Our friends in France seemed very pleased that we chose a scholarly French name, and the priest that baptized Blaise was also all excited to tell me about St. Blaise and St. Ursula. The question everybody has asked us is where the name(s) come from, and we honestly feel a little bad that we don't have a great story. Still, there is a lot of neat stuff about her name we can tell you, some of which helped us decide that it was a great name for our kid.
OK, the first thing is going to sound a little dumb, but I'm just going to fess up: I thought it would be cool for her to have doubled B's for initials. I've got 'em, my Dad's got 'em, and they've worked out great. When I was a little kid I thought it was really cool that I had an alliterative name, and since I didn't have any desire to actually pass my own first name on in any form this seemed like a neat way to keep an ad hoc tradition going. Besides, lots of great superhero names have doubled initials: Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Reed Richards...you catch my drift.
So why Blaise? Why not any other girl's name that starts with B? Honestly, we just saw it on a list and liked it. It sounded strong and interesting, and both of us liked the idea that it was a unique name by virtue of being old rather than new. (I actually told some of my friends that the girl's name we picked was old-fashioned, and when they started guessing things like "Beatrice," I couldn't resist telling them that I meant "like Middle-Ages-old.")
The name has a few neat things associated with it that we knew we liked. St. Blaise has one of the more interesting rituals in the Catholic church associated with him, in which a blessing to ward off throat disease (one of the things Blaise is patron of) is accompanied by crossing lit candles at the neck of the petitioner. He's also the patron saint of infants, animals, and (according to some sources) scientists...three things that more or less sum up our household. Besides St. Blaise, Blaise Pascal was an important mathematician and Christian scholar famed for his attempts to reconcile science and religion and fleshing out a great deal of probability theory. If you're curious, looking up "Pascal's triangle" and "Pascal's wager" will give you a good sense of both aspects of his life and how he tried to reconcile them. Finally, it turns out that "Blaise" is actually derived from the same root as "Balas." In a sense, this means that we've effectively named our daughter something approximating "Shrimp Scampi" but I figure it's alright.
So what about "Ursula?" This one is unfortunately just us being a little cutesy. We fell into the habit early on of referring to the baby as "The Cub," and so a middle name that means "Little She-Bear" seemed appropriate. I know, I know...we're reverse-anthropomorphizing bears Disney-style. But you know what? Bears are awesome. They're top of the food-chain in most ecosystems they inhabit, are better swimmers and tree-climbers than most animals who develop only one such skill, and can walk bipedally whenever they feel like it. Seriously...beat that. We also just thought it was a pretty name.
So that's pretty much it. Like I said, not so much of a great story or anything, but we feel like we've given her a name that's got a lot to recommend it. It's a name with history and strength, and seems to suit her very well. I think some of our family and friends have been a bit surprised that we did pick something unconventional, but I also think that when you meet her it doesn't take long to see that she really is "Blaise."
I actually overheard her day nurse briefing the night crew on Blaise's condition, and at the first mention of her name, the new nurse interrupted right away:
"What?"
"Blaise. Blaise Conwell."
"How do you spell that?"
"B-L-A-I-S-E."
"Oh. Hunh."
Most of the reactions we've heard have been really positive (though those are only the ones that we've heard). Our friends in France seemed very pleased that we chose a scholarly French name, and the priest that baptized Blaise was also all excited to tell me about St. Blaise and St. Ursula. The question everybody has asked us is where the name(s) come from, and we honestly feel a little bad that we don't have a great story. Still, there is a lot of neat stuff about her name we can tell you, some of which helped us decide that it was a great name for our kid.
OK, the first thing is going to sound a little dumb, but I'm just going to fess up: I thought it would be cool for her to have doubled B's for initials. I've got 'em, my Dad's got 'em, and they've worked out great. When I was a little kid I thought it was really cool that I had an alliterative name, and since I didn't have any desire to actually pass my own first name on in any form this seemed like a neat way to keep an ad hoc tradition going. Besides, lots of great superhero names have doubled initials: Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Reed Richards...you catch my drift.
So why Blaise? Why not any other girl's name that starts with B? Honestly, we just saw it on a list and liked it. It sounded strong and interesting, and both of us liked the idea that it was a unique name by virtue of being old rather than new. (I actually told some of my friends that the girl's name we picked was old-fashioned, and when they started guessing things like "Beatrice," I couldn't resist telling them that I meant "like Middle-Ages-old.")
The name has a few neat things associated with it that we knew we liked. St. Blaise has one of the more interesting rituals in the Catholic church associated with him, in which a blessing to ward off throat disease (one of the things Blaise is patron of) is accompanied by crossing lit candles at the neck of the petitioner. He's also the patron saint of infants, animals, and (according to some sources) scientists...three things that more or less sum up our household. Besides St. Blaise, Blaise Pascal was an important mathematician and Christian scholar famed for his attempts to reconcile science and religion and fleshing out a great deal of probability theory. If you're curious, looking up "Pascal's triangle" and "Pascal's wager" will give you a good sense of both aspects of his life and how he tried to reconcile them. Finally, it turns out that "Blaise" is actually derived from the same root as "Balas." In a sense, this means that we've effectively named our daughter something approximating "Shrimp Scampi" but I figure it's alright.
So what about "Ursula?" This one is unfortunately just us being a little cutesy. We fell into the habit early on of referring to the baby as "The Cub," and so a middle name that means "Little She-Bear" seemed appropriate. I know, I know...we're reverse-anthropomorphizing bears Disney-style. But you know what? Bears are awesome. They're top of the food-chain in most ecosystems they inhabit, are better swimmers and tree-climbers than most animals who develop only one such skill, and can walk bipedally whenever they feel like it. Seriously...beat that. We also just thought it was a pretty name.
So that's pretty much it. Like I said, not so much of a great story or anything, but we feel like we've given her a name that's got a lot to recommend it. It's a name with history and strength, and seems to suit her very well. I think some of our family and friends have been a bit surprised that we did pick something unconventional, but I also think that when you meet her it doesn't take long to see that she really is "Blaise."
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Because indoctrination can never start too soon
Two big events are happening this weekend. The first is the MIT Mystery Hunt, which Ben and I have been doing for something like 10 years. It's an annual puzzle event (think crossword, not jigsaw) that gathers over a thousand of the country's best puzzle solvers on the MIT campus for a weekend-long extravaganza of fun, frustration and sleep deprivation. The second is a Steelers play-off game. (I hear we're also inaugurating a new president or something.)
Even though we postponed our honeymoon to do Mystery Hunt, we couldn't delay parenthood for a few weeks, so we're not very involved with it this year. Still, we've explained Hunt to Blaise and she seems excited about helping next year, when she's healthier and knows some words.
As for the Steelers game, Ben's parents are visiting this weekend and brought Blaise a Terrible Towel. She has a strong grasping reflex and can wave her hands around, which is about the level of skill required for using a Terrible Towel. Not to be outdone, Blaise's Uncle Jim, who is also here this weekend, brought her a little Royals hat. Having been born less than a mile from Fenway, Blaise's first allegiance is to the Red Sox, but the Royals are a nice second team to support. We're planning to keep her an AL baby at least, so we've explained several times why the DH is a good idea. Photos with her visitors and their sports-related gifts will be up soon.
And now for the medical update: Blaise is gaining weight from her IV nutrition at a nice pace. She was born weighing 3 lbs 14 oz (1760 grams), but lost a lot of weight that first weeks. She was down to about 1500 grams (3 lbs 5 oz), but now she's up to 1665 grams (3 lbs 11 oz). It's great to see her gaining weight. She's also doing very well with the minimal oral feedings. In fact, she LOVES the oral feedings. They're also continuing to build up the amount she gets through the tube in her stomach. We'll hit a ceiling on that at some point, but the important part of that exercise is to keep her small intestine active and healthy while she grows on the IV nutrients.
Even though we postponed our honeymoon to do Mystery Hunt, we couldn't delay parenthood for a few weeks, so we're not very involved with it this year. Still, we've explained Hunt to Blaise and she seems excited about helping next year, when she's healthier and knows some words.
As for the Steelers game, Ben's parents are visiting this weekend and brought Blaise a Terrible Towel. She has a strong grasping reflex and can wave her hands around, which is about the level of skill required for using a Terrible Towel. Not to be outdone, Blaise's Uncle Jim, who is also here this weekend, brought her a little Royals hat. Having been born less than a mile from Fenway, Blaise's first allegiance is to the Red Sox, but the Royals are a nice second team to support. We're planning to keep her an AL baby at least, so we've explained several times why the DH is a good idea. Photos with her visitors and their sports-related gifts will be up soon.
And now for the medical update: Blaise is gaining weight from her IV nutrition at a nice pace. She was born weighing 3 lbs 14 oz (1760 grams), but lost a lot of weight that first weeks. She was down to about 1500 grams (3 lbs 5 oz), but now she's up to 1665 grams (3 lbs 11 oz). It's great to see her gaining weight. She's also doing very well with the minimal oral feedings. In fact, she LOVES the oral feedings. They're also continuing to build up the amount she gets through the tube in her stomach. We'll hit a ceiling on that at some point, but the important part of that exercise is to keep her small intestine active and healthy while she grows on the IV nutrients.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)