Dirty mullets are NOT cute on one-month-old little girls.

Check out this nappy hair. Because of the PICC in Emma's head, we can't wash her hair for risk of infection. And her hair is getting long, too. Gosh, I cannot WAIT to bathe her!! It looks like she has a bald spot, but it's just the baby bald spot. Her hair also looks pretty brown, but it's actually lighter than that. Being dirty makes it look darker, too. Ich.



For the second day in a row, Emma's gained 4 ounces in a day. She now weighs 8 pounds, 13 ounces. She's going to outgrow all our newborn diapers and clothes before we even get her home! The good news is that the NICU doctors have told us time and time again that good eating and growth is the best thing to help babies heal. Believe me, homegirl doesn't play around when it comes to eating. Praise God that she enjoys her food...this is one of His ways of taking care of her.

We learned today that we'll probably have to have a car bed for her to travel in for a while. I don't know how long "a while" is, but this is something we'll just borrow from the hospital I think. Because of where the incision is and how babies lie in an infant carrier, she probably can't go in her infant carrier. So it looks like she'll be a shut-in until she can travel for a good period of time in the infant carrier...because even if she can travel in the car with a car bed, what do we do with her once we get where we're going?? The social worker assigned to us is very proactive and is already thinking of things to address with Dr. Troup regarding helping us care for her when we leave.

Dr. Troup and his nurse came by today, and I requested that Erica, our nurse extraordinaire, change the dressing an hour early so that he could see the wound. I just really want him to see the wound so that he'd have an idea of when a shunt could go in. He was pleased with the progress, and there's now only one little place in the middle where he thinks that muscle and skin are still separated. He thinks the white stuff with a little black coming through in the middle is necrotic (dead) tissue and that it's just going to come up on its own. One funny thing I've learned about the NICU is that over-the-counter drugs like Mylicon and hydrogen peroxide have to be ordered from the pharmacy. So when he asked for some peroxide so that he could "play" with this part of the wound, it was going to take an act of Congress to get peroxide quickly. You could tell he was irritated with this, but I know he understands why. He used the blunt wooden end of a sterile cotton swab and scraped around in there trying to get some of that tissue to come loose, and the peroxide would have helped that. Even though I've been looking at this incision for 4 weeks now (a month!!), I still couldn't watch him scraping around in that wound with a piece of wood! We also asked if they would culture the incision again to test for more infection-causing bacteria, and he said no - they would only do it if it starting getting runny and oozing again.

Still no word on when the shunt will be, but we expected this. I have a feeling that it's going to be last-minute...Dr. Troup's going to walk in one day...let's say Friday, for example...and say, "Well, based on how the incision looks and how full her head is, let's do the shunt Monday." (DO NOT SPREAD RUMORS THAT THE SHUNT WILL GO IN ON MONDAY. THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL!) As I've already said, Dr. Troup is kind of a big deal around here, and we still continue to learn that more and more. Even though he does a very specific thing for the hospital, he's still a big deal because there aren't a whole lot of doctors out there who do what he does. And do it so well. So I think he can get surgeries scheduled pretty quickly without anyone giving him a hard time.

I'm a little nervous about tonight's nurse because she had no idea how to feed Emma. None. She has already spoken with one of the other nurses who has only had Emma once about helping care for her, including how to change her dressing. YIKES! She was anxious to watch how Russell and I did it. I'm going to have trouble falling asleep tonight. Once I do fall asleep, I'll sleep like a log, but as soon as my eyes pop open in the morning, I'll be calling to see how it went. I suppose I need to have ANOTHER conversation with a supervisor about the night nurses. We've got the day nurses pretty well under control, plus we're here during the day just in case a nurse isn't sure about something. But at nighttime, we don't have the same nurses NOR are we here. Scary. I'm not really being a control freak about this, but there are lots of things going on with Emma that are out-of-the ordinary, and new nurses are sometimes overwhelmed by her. The fact that she has a PICC in her head, eats on her tummy, and gets doses of Heparin flushed through her PICC (which no other babies get) are 3 things right off the bat that throw new nurses off a little. I know the nurses are a lot more knowledgeable than I, but there are idiosyncrasies about Emma that new nurses ask us...it would just be easier on my mind if she had nurses who didn't need to ask us questions about how to care for her.

This video is a little dark because she's sleeping, but it's a snippet of how much noise Emma makes when she sleeps. Take this noise, plus the 3 or 4 seconds it took me to get to her with the camera, times every 5 to 10 minutes. Thank goodness for the video monitor at home, or we'd be up every 10 minutes checking on her. We're going to be heavy sleepers once we get used to all this noise at night. She sounds like a creaky door in a haunted house, doesn't she?