It doesn't really feel like Mother's Day...

Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet! I just feel like everyone has made a mistake - I'm not a mom. Today is a day for MY mom, not me. But I do appreciate the two big gifts that I got today - a baby who slept from 11:30 to 5:45 last night, and then again from 6:30 to 9 this morning! The other gift is a Sony Handycam from Russell and Emma so that I can film anything Emma does that Russell misses while he's at work. Unfortunately, Emma wasn't quite as good today as she was yesterday - very fussy today. We're hoping for another good night's rest!

Tomorrow Emma has her first 2 doctors' appointments since we've come home. We're going to the pediatrician in the morning and Dr. Troup in the afternoon. Today we battled some pretty loose poop that got on Emma's incision again, so hopefully the pediatrician can help us figure out something for her formula. Dr. Troup's visit isn't really because he needs to see her again, but the next time we'd see him otherwise would be for a brief visit at the Shriner's Hospital. The Shriner's Hospital here in Greenville has a spina bifida clinic that people drive hours to come to. The kids rotate among 4 or 5 doctors or therapists, and he's one of them. None of these visits are particularly long; if there's a problem that needs to be addressed more intensely, you come back to that specific doctor's office at a different time. Dr. Troup requested our visit tomorrow for us, not him, because he knew there was no way we could wait until the Shriner's clinic to see him again. I don't know if he does this for all parents, but he knows we ask lots of questions. And he's right - I wouldn't have waited until the Shriner's clinic to call with questions. Actually, his nurse called to check on us at the end of last week, which was really nice. It's not like the day after surgery or anything; they were just calling to check how we were doing since Emma came home.

Emma's incision looks AMAZING. There's one small place in it that was really deep. The wound nurse told us to be careful that the edges don't start to heal and roll into the depth of the wound. If that happens, it will just heal as a crevice, instead of heal from the bottom up to form a flat surface. Now it's getting so small that it's hard to tell if the edges are rolling, so I'm going to ask Dr. Troup about it tomorrow. He's the one who would do something about it anyway. I think he'd have to either cut or burn those edges of skin off, which I don't think would require anesthesia - maybe just local anesthesia. The fluid on Emma's brain is draining like it's supposed to, I think. We just keep feeling her soft spot to determine if it's too low or too high and lay her flat or raise her up accordingly. We can definitely tell that the size of her head has decreased since the shunt. It's still bigger, comparatively, but it looks better than it did. In this picture, you can still tell that her forehead looks kinda high, but her double chin balances it out on the bottom :)