Six Pounds of Tired

A blog is once again overdue, but I don’t even think our camera has been used since the last one. I feel awful when I think how thorough and richly illustrated Molli Malou’s early weeks were blogged, but our lives were simpler then and there weren’t as many complications.

I spent a couple of hours with Maddie yesterday, my first visit since Saturday. Trine had warned me that Maddie had been awake for a very long stretch with her earlier in the day, with Mormor on hand, and would therefore probably be very sleepy and restful if not totally unconscious during my visit.

“Well, damn,” I’d said, “is it even worth going for a visit if all she’s going to do is lie there and sleep?”

Sure enough, she was sleeping soundly when I arrived at about 7:30 in the evening. A big, beautiful, very normal-looking baby, in a normal newborn crib, in a normal newborn onesie with a normal newborn diaper. Her Uruguayan neighbors had moved out to a room with a bed, so Maddie has the room to herself – but since she’s not in “Isolation” it’s not creepy anymore. It aint’ the Glostrup Hilton, but it’s nice.

Trine had said I should check Maddie’s diaper immediately upon arrival. My fiddling with her diaper to have a peek at any recently manufactured products woke her, slightly. Gradually she seemed to realize it was me, that big person without breasts who sometimes comes around and handles her clumsily, and she began to stir a little more fitfully. I felt bad for having awakened her: she was going to be so tired, after all. I tried to soothe her back to sleep.

She didn’t want to be soothed back to sleep, but she damn sure wanted something. Her diaper had been empty of soilds (though heavy with liquids), so I thought I might help her work out some stoppage. I bicycled her pudgy legs (which are strong enough that she can actually plant her feet against the acrylic baseboard of her crib and “push” herself further up the mattress), but that got me nowhere. I took her temperature, since Trine has reported that the mere act of using the anal thermometer sometimes gets things moving. No dice. So I wrapped her up in a fresh diaper, buttoned her onesie, and stroked her tummy, assuring her that dinner was just 10 or 15 minutes away – because I now assumed her grunts and squeaks and general restiveness were the result not of constipation but of hunger.

After about two minutes of stroking her and whispering reassurances and telling her how badly Molli Malou had wanted to join me on this visit, I was suddenly shocked by a roar from her stomach –- the sound a washing machine might make if you filled it with vinegar and baking soda and set it on high – followed directly by the sound of a violent eruption in her diaper, and an immediate, awful, overpowering stench from the same vicinity. The girl herself cooed up at me happily: relief at last!

I changed her diaper again, praising her for the good work – it was still a sloppy liquid mess, the poor thing really needs to get over her bad stomach – and I thought she’d settle down at last and fall back asleep (so tired, I’d been warned, surely she’d barely be able to keep her eyes open!). But she was still fussy and squeaky and whiney, even after I took her up and sat down with her in my lap. Though she’d emptied parts of herself, she was still clearly full of piss and vinegar. She managed to jerk the air thing out of her nose, accidentally I thought, until it became a pattern. She tugged at the feeding tube. She was snotty and sneezed a lot. (The snot was surely aggravating the tubes.) She kicked her legs angrily, unhappy with how the dyne lay across her feet. She wrenched her head around, unhappy with how it lay. While I fiddled with the air tube, trying to get it firmly back in, she managed to kick her dyne off and onto the floor, meaning the linens would have to be changed. She glared at me defiantly.

Probably just ‘cause she was so tired.

The nurse came and helped me get things back under control and queued Maddie up with 20 mg of milk. I took Maddie back in my lap and held the syringe. It quieted Maddie a little. The next 20mg made her happy. The final 20 seemed to sate her at last, settle her down, and I was sure she’d fall asleep – it was by now about 8:30, and she’d been up since 7:45 or so. She’d cleared her bowels and taken a big old meal, and Trine had of course told me how tired she was, so of course she’d fall asleep now.

But not only wouldn’t she sleep, she wouldn’t sit still. She rustled and twisted and squirmed and squeaked and whinnied and cried and kept yanking at her tubes – and then the hiccups hit, the big ones that make her seem less like a baby with hiccups than a case of hiccups with a baby. I tried to hold her up on my shoulder, and that’s when the air tube finally broke completely free of her face – it went flying off her. She squirmed on my chest and shoulders, when she wasn’t practically exploding from a hiccup, and now I was beginning to panic: I was only making her uncomfortable! All she needed was sleep, poor tired thing, and here comes daddy to wake her up, ruin her routine, let her tubes fall out of her face – the tube! She’s only getting 0.001 pressure, but apparently it makes a big difference. She could be dropping catastrophically – I had to get the tube back in! I managed to contort myself enough that I was able to see the monitor without hurting Maddie or jerking any more wires or tubes off her – and her oxygen saturation was at 96. Her heartbeat was normal. She was fine – miserable, but fine.

I settled her into her crib, her normal newborn crib without the tent or the fancy sci-fi stuff, called in the nurse to help with the tubes, and finally had her tucked in and cozy. It was about 8:45 by now. I’d been planning on leaving at 9:00 anyway, and the tired, tired creature would surely be asleep by then. So I just sat in the chair beside her crib, stroking her gently, talking to her, and staring at her beautiful face – which stared back at me happily enough, at last, even smiling a couple of times.

9:00 came and went. So did 9:01, 9:02, 9:15, 9:30… she wasn’t being fussy, she just seemed wide awake and very interested in things. Very perceptive, very aware. We had a lot of fun just looking at each other, opening and closing our hands. Every five minutes or so I’d have to stop her from trying to jerk the food tube out of her nose – it springs sort of straight out and arches like a weird deepsea fish antenna when it’s not connected to a food syringe, so she kind of stares at it cross-eyed (try NOT to cross your eyes looking at something an inch in front of the tip of your nose!), then bats at it with her arm until she’s lucky enough to feel her palm come in contact with the tube, at which point the fingers wrap around it and the tugging begins.

I stood over her, leaned down, and sang made-up songs to her, softly enough not to be heard by anyone else. She liked that, but it didn’t make her sleepy. I told her about my day, about Molli Malou’s day, about Molli Malou’s having admitted she was happy but also angry at the prospect of Maddie coming home with us. Why angry, I had asked her, letting her know first that it was okay to feel angry. “Because she’s going to cry a lot,” Molli Malou had explained over dinner, “And she’s going to take my lipstick!”

Maddie took all this in sagely, drinking the information in, her eyelids showing no sign of heaviness.

Mine were. I was tired, very tired. The dark room and hushed tones were beginning to work on me. I hadn’t had more than 5 hours of sleep in several nights, and my days have been nonstop work, professional and domestic. I settled back into the chair. “I know,” I told myself, “I’ll shut my eyes. That will be her queue. She’ll see me sleeping and she’ll know it’s okay to sleep.”

I know you all expect the end of this story to be, “Then I woke up and the sun was rising…” – and it was the ending I’d prefer, even though it would have made a mess of my morning. No, I wasn’t so lucky. I couldn’t fall asleep knowing this six-pound (!) creature beside me was so wide awake and interested. But I knew I had to be awake and getting ready for work in way less than eight hours. So with a heavy heart I bundled her up, kissed her, said goodnight, and left for the night.

(I omit the part where I left her for a few minutes to call and wake her mother and ask what I should do because it reflects poorly on me, and things that reflect poorly on daddy tend not to get as much ink on these pages as things that can be deflected off on others. Older, literate, discerning Molli Malou and Maddie will know that Daddy’s histories are always selective, though, so I don’t trouble myself too much about it.)

She’s still taking the oxygen, the infinitesimal dose, and even though she obviously can do just fine without it, she doesn’t always, and even with the oxygen she did once drop down to about 85% saturation while I was with her. (I have subsequently learned that since no alarm rang when that drop occurred, it was more likely a mechanical issue than a real drop, especially because she shot back up to 90-91 very quickly.)

Yes, she is really about six pounds now (over 2800g, in any case, which is 6.17 pounds right there). She gets prettier every day. Her hair still seems darker than her sister’s was, but her eyes seem on the same trajectory from darkest violet toward a bright blue (but will she share her sister’s faint green accents?). Her scans and tests and everything to continue to come back normal. The general medical consensus seems to be: she’s a normal healthy baby who’s just slow on the saturation (and happens to be suffering from a stomach bug of some type). There are no promises of an early release, so we still don’t expect her home before her due date of 26 January. Possibly later, but probably and hopefully not.

It’s been so long since her last visit that I’m thinking of swinging Molli Malou by the hospital on Sunday, just for a 10-15 minute peek at her little sister. No touching. No holding. No close breathing. Just a glance to remind her that she really does have a little sister who’ll be coming home very soon.

And stealing her lipstick.