A night off for a night out!

Yay, I took a night off of blogging in exchange for a night out with Russell! My sweet husband got us tickets to see Needtobreathe and Will Hoge (and some other guy I've never heard of) at Clemson last night. We even ended up sitting with a couple from our Sunday School class, and we saw our cousin there, too - I feel like I rejoined society for a little while. And a HUGE thank you to our moms for watching Miss Emma while we were gone. I even got to wear my rings. I haven't worn my rings in almost 6 weeks because you can't wear rings and watches in the NICU. I don't even bother wearing them at all because I don't want to risk losing them when I'd have to take them off. For those of you who may not know me that well, you may not know that I love diamonds. Going back to how sweet my husband is: Russell has graciously indulged this love of mine...within reason, of course. He gave me engagement, wedding, and anniversary rings that I LOVE. Call me materialistic if you want, but believe me when I say that I am very grateful for what we've been blessed with. I'm just being honest, people. So what a blessing Friday night was for so many reasons!

We've been seeing fantastic improvements in Emma's incision over the last two days. We can now see that it's getting smaller overall, and we can also see detailed improvements in certain areas of the wound. As I've been saying, there's a lot of white muscle separation or something like that on one end of the wound. As the gross stuff on top of the white comes out like it's supposed to, we're more and more aware of how deep the wound is at that point...and it's going to take a while for the tissue to granulate on top of it. I just hope that Dr. Troup doesn't see it on Monday before her shunt surgery and think that the wound needs more time to improve before we worry about the shunt. On the other hand, I think his main concern is infection - as long as there's no infection present now or any spinal fluid leaking through the white muscle separation, we'll probably still go ahead with the shunt.

Emma's been sleeping a TON lately, but she fights it for a while. Tonight she was very fussy, and the nurse ordered some Tylenol for her. It turns out that something was hurting because Emma was out like a light soon after the Tylenol ran its course. The nurse has been suspicious the last couple of days that something is hurting...we just don't know what. If it's her poor little head, let's hope the shunt will take care of that! I've heard that she may be fussy for a little while after the shunt goes in because she'll be experiencing significant changes in pressure and changes in the position of her skull plates. Still no estimate on when she'll actually go home.

Russell and Emma had some good snuggle and nap time today. When she's really comfortable, Emma completely sprawls out on the pillow.