The Art of Cheese

So a few weeks ago Norah took her fake smile to a whole new level and will now "cheese" on request. Typically she will throw her head back and close her eyes and give the most ridiculous grin she can. Here are some from the past few days.

Over-the-top cheese

Cheesing with daddy. His face looked so crazy I had to cut him out of the picture!

Mini-cheese
Semi-genuine cheese
Cheesy play.

Surgery pics

So Thursday morning we were up at wonderful and DARK 4 am. Norah was majorly PISSED OFF when I woke her up and screamed bloody murder while I changed her diaper and dressed her. She was allowed Pedialyte until 5 am. So here she is at 4:55 am drinking 1 oz of the stuff. Look at those sleepy eyes...

So then we get to the hospital almost on time at 6:10 am and check in. We saw this lovely sign on the way up that reads Welcome New Patients and Norah's name was the top left one. That was nice of them to do. So why is it that the hospitals always want you there an hour or more early? It takes 5 minutes to weigh the kids and sign the forms. Why did we really need to be up at 4 am? Why did we wait in the rec. room until 7:30? Don't they know my baby is hungry and tired? So other than that their rec. room was AMAZING. It had 50 billion toys for every age range. There were pianos, WIIs, Playstations, Lego's, arts and crafts, a big TV with tons of movies, books, basically everything a kid could want short of candy and ice cream. And this is at Shriner's so it was all donated or purchased through donations. It was just awesome. If we had to be stuck somewhere with a hungry tired kid this was the place to be. I think it deserves a million pictures to capture the awesomeness.

Little kids area... you can't even see all the toys in bins and buckets and on shelves.
Art area with psycho fish.
Norah rode the horsey.
Played with a doll house.

Was generally very happy and good.
Now why is it with all of the toys she wants to go bang on the big black storage cabinet??!?!

Ummm, yeah, she found the only loose wires in the room.

Video games, play house, air hockey, etc. It rocked.
Lego and train tables.
One of the 2 pianos....
Globe on top of the piano happened to be turned to Viet Nam
Daddy playing basketball with Norah.

"Ummm, mommy, daddy is throwing a ball inside...."
Sleepy eyes.Uh oh, time to get ready for surgery.
And then she was Miss Personality. Smiling at the nurses. Waving bye bye.

The doctors even thought she got happy juice in pre-op. She was just chillin'. They drew a smiley on her arm to mark it for the operation.

Oh yeah, did I mention that our anesthesiologist was about 80 years old. I am not even kidding. I wish I was. She looked older than my grandma. That was pretty scary.

The last suck of that precious thumb. Then they took her away.
2 hours later we get the call to come to post-op and we have a screaming baby. They were trying to give her watered down apple juice cut with pedialyte. She was having none of it.
Mama knows baby is hungry!!
And then she calmly passed out. You know, I would scream too if I woke up to that scary clown back there looking at me.

Wonderful post-op nurse, Bob, (he was a cool guy) and peds floor nurse Tracy took really good care of us. Norah had a pile of presents on her bed waiting for her when she got out of surgery. Yes, presents!! She got a cell phone toy that does a lot of things, much more advanced than the ones we have at home and a nursery rhymes book and CD and an interactive book and DVD with DVD remote that the kids can use. That last one was a little out of her age range but she will grow into it. We were very impressed.
Then we moved upstairs to her "room" which was really a quad room. It was really cramped in there as there were 2 other girls that had been there for weeks. One of them was either Amish or Quaker and as the surgeon said, the whole village was there for a visit. They tried to make it nice for us, brought in a little TV and DVDs of Baby Einstein & Elmo's World but we were so so glad we did not have to stay overnight.

Norah still sleeping right until discharge.

Then back at home and wide awake on Vicodin.
Mom, the drugs are wearing off!!!!
So, as far as the operation goes, they put her under and then tried to get the IV in. It took them over an hour. She has very small rolling veins. ( That runs in my family, btw ;-)) She has over 20 pricks in her arm, hand, ankle, foot and forehead. Poor baby. Then the actual surgery took about 10 minutes the doctor said. After they clipped the band of skin holding her fingers together, they just came apart. Up until that point it was unknown if they were held together by skin or tissue at the base of the finger. So she has 4 little stitches in her fingers. We have yet to see them as our follow-up isn't until the 21st and she has to keep her dressings on until then. She tried to rip them off on the way home from the hospital so now she has a sock over her hand.

On a side note, we were really impressed with the service we got at Shriners. We learned a lot about the hospital while we were there. There are 22 in the U.S. with different specialties at different hospitals. It costs $1.6 million per day to run the hospitals and it all comes from donations. Our surgeon had 33 years of experience and works at Children's Hospital and has done work at the Mayo Clinic. The surgeries performed there are all free to the patients but a lot of people do not know about them. I wish that we had been able to have her cleft lip repair done there but that specialty is performed in the Chicago hospital and we figured that staying in Chicago for a few weeks would cost just as much as paying through our insurance company. So as nurse Tracy said, get the word out!

I will post more about Norah's recovery probably tomorrow. She is up now and getting into everything around my desk. Argh....

Surgery Update

Sorry all for not posting earlier. Norah's surgery went really smoothly yesterday. So smoothly that they discharged us at 1pm and we avoided the dreaded overnight stay! They gave us a scrip for Vicodin which we were really happy about. The tylenol with codine that we had during her CL repair just didn't seem to cut it and the vicodin seemed to be working great at the hospital. Norah was up and very active all afternoon yesterday and went to bed slightly off schedule and then woke at 10 pm and would NOT go back to sleep. She wanted to sleep, she was clearly tired but the drugs were making her loopy and wound up. She is like her mommy and reacts the opposite way to drugs than one is supposed to. Then she started coughing really and seemed to be breathing hard so we decided not to give her any more vicodin through the night. I finally got her to sleep around 12:30 am and she slept to 5:30am. Daddy gave her drugs when she woke up and we had sleep issues again today. She is only wanting to sleep on us right now or snuggled between us which is not how I want this to be going. I have a feeling that the day care is holding her a lot at nap time and getting her used to that which we have not done since shortly after our return from Viet Nam. She has been a solitary sleeper and a good one at that. I do not want to undo that in any way. We called our care coordinator and got a new scrip for the tylenol with codine (at least we know it knocks her out!) and she finally took a nap today at 4 pm. She was clearly in pain before those drugs kicked in, crying hard with a shaking lip, motrin was not cutting it. I am hoping tonight goes better, we all need the rest and I am debating trying to make it to the CHI reunion picnic tomorrow. We would really like to see so many of our fellow bloggers and kiddos but it all depends on how Norah is doing. I will post pictures over the weekend.

Surgery Day

I was up at 4 am.... this should go well..... poor baby has already been screaming for 20 minutes and we haven't even left the house yet.

Happy 4th of July and 11 Months

This great 4th of July weekend we laid low and took it easy. We had some really nice cool weather and calm days to just relax in preparation for a busy month. Norah got some alone time with mommy and daddy which I think she really needed. Although she is adjusting well to school we have noticed some changes like extra clinginess and issues with napping. She had another fall this week at school too when she was climbing out of the baby pool and fell face first onto the hard wood floor. She cut her lip in 2 places, on her scar of course, and had a nose bleed that continued off and on all day Tuesday. We know that at this age where they are just starting to walk and explore accidents do happen but it is still rough to get those calls when you are at work and helpless.

Here are some photos from us playing on the 4th:

An attempt at a hug for Addison...

Here she was crawling towards me and I kept sliding her back across the floor. She thought it was a great game.


And of course she is pulling up now on all the cabinets, fridge, dishwasher, etc. How long before she is pushing those buttons??
My girl... so big at 11 months. I cannot believe it. Where does the time go?
Then we went outside for some time with the neighbors. She stole my seat and no, she did not get up there herself.
Then she was mad at mommy for setting her in the sun and the grass. She hasn't adjusted yet to grass. She goes in reverse when barefoot on it, trying to climb backwards onto my feet or shoes.
Flying baby.

Waving "hi"... this was new this week. Hi and Bye and one time a word that sounded like hi accompanied the action.
Cousin Liam watching his daddy set-off snakes that look like "poop"... that is him saying "poop" below. It was pretty darn cute.
The classic brow furrow.
Liam and Aunt Jessi post "boom" of a fire cracker.
Cousin Aiden with a sparkler.

I had fun with the camera while the guys were setting off the big fireworks. I don't even know what I was doing but they were somewhat time lapsed and came out neat!
This is my favorite.
And again Saturday Norah would not nap so daddy was holding her in bed to calm her down and this is what I walked in on, 2 sleeping babies....

This Thursday Norah goes to Shriners Hospital to have the 1st of her 2 hand surgeries. From our last discussion with the doctor it should be on her right hand and will separate all 3 middle fingers. We are feeling very anxious about this but praying it goes better than the lip surgery which we were so totally mentally unprepared for. It has to be better than that, right? We will then be home with her for 2 weeks for recovery time and in 6 weeks we get to do it all over again on her left hand. I really wish we could just get it all over with at once but the doctor thinks she will chew through her bandages to get to her hands since she is so active these days. We will see. I hope to post next weekend if all goes well and my baby isn't screaming in pain again. Yuck. Wish us luck!