Lots of friends visited today. Our friends Angel Wilson and Leah Ericksen brought us lunch, making time out of a busy week that’s leading up to an overseas vacation. And Will and Sabine Friedman brought over tons of food for dinner. Jan and Will collaborated on grilling food and managed to drop only one hot dog into the coals.
Today grandma Lyn and Anya wrote the following story:
One day, a girl named Anya made a small red house out of Legos. Then she made a big blue house out of Legos. Then she made ten orange houses out of Legos. Then she made a hundred yellow houses out of Legos. Her house was full of houses made out of Legos. When her grammy saw all the houses Anya had made, she said, “Anya! You are a smart girl, and you have made a lot of houses out of Legos! You have made too many houses out of Legos! Could you please STOP making houses out of Legos?” “Okay,” said Anya. And she made five hundred cars out of Legos! Then she and her grammy and her mommy had to laugh and laugh and laugh. They had to laugh five billion times.
THE END
Angela finished her second knitting project: a scarf for Liya. She started from a pattern, but soon abandoned the pattern and improvised. This time around, she used a nice purple and pink silk yarn. The scarf came out great! (Better than Angela expected, she says.)
We watched tonight’s fireworks in our usual parents-of-small-children manner: from a second floor window of our house. As luck would have it, the Seattle Tennis Club down the street puts on a small fireworks display over Lake Washington. The best views of the fireworks from our house are from the kids’ rooms. The girls go to bed around 8:00, and the fireworks don’t start until 10:00, so we’d asked Anya and Liya if they wanted to be woken up for the fireworks and they’d said yes. When the show started we tried to wake both of them, and while Anya snapped awake pretty quickly, Liya could not be woken up no matter what we did, so we just put her back to bed. Anya enjoyed the fireworks for the few minutes the show ran, then popped back into bed.
When we visited Angela’s brother in L.A. last Christmas, the girls’ cousins Anthony and Brian introduced the girls to the TV show The Backyardigans. Since that time, this show has become the girls’ favorite form of entertainment, pushing out Blue’s Clues, Kipper the Dog, and pretty much everything else. Each day they get to watch one episode—Anya gets to pick the episode on odd days, Liya on even days.
By now they’ve seen every episode multiple times, and know the songs from their favorite episodes by heart. At dinner time recently we adults had a discussion of the dominant character traits in the stars of the show: Pablo, Tyrone, Tasha, Austin, and Uniqua. This week the girls purchased little Tasha and Unique dolls, and have been carrying the dolls with them wherever they go. Anya made a little paper dress for Tasha that matches the one Tasha wore in “Whodunnit”, then helped Liya make a vest for Uniqua. They take these dresses off the dolls at bedtime and put them back on in the morning. Tonight Anya had Grandma and Daddy each tell her a different made-up story involving The Backyardigans, and then made up a story of her own.
We are go for launch. Chaos to ensue in T-minus 3 days!
We had the final ultrasound and an amniocentesis this morning, and Pixie’s lungs are mature enough for us to proceed with the C-section on Monday.
Anya and Liya’s second cousin Jaden visited us today, along with his mom Julie and dad George. They were all up from Sacramento, stopping in Seattle to embark on a cruise to Alaska. The girls had a ton of fun showing Jaden their bunk bed, which the three of them turned into a fort. After lunch we walked over to the Madison Park playground and walked back through the village.
Only about 12 hours to go. We’d thought that knowing exactly when little Pixie is going to arrive would be less suspenseful than the way it was the first two times around, where Anya and Liya just decided when they were ready and surprised us one day. We got that wrong—it’s actually way more suspenseful this way, counting down the days, and now hours, to Pixie’s arrival.
Spent the weekend in a big push to get everything unpacked into the (mostly complete) new kitchen, under the premise that as of tomorrow morning, anything left packed in a cardboard box would have stayed in that box for at least a year.
C-section pre-op. We get up around 6:00 am, both of us having gotten little sleep. (Liya work up in middle of night, etc.) Breakfast and leave for Swedish Hospital with E-Moon around 7:15, Mom stays at home with Anya and Liya. Check in at 7:30 and meet Rebecca, the nurse who will be taking care of Angela. She leads us to C-Section Admin/Recovery Room 577. Over the next two hours, Rebecca helps Angela get ready, drawing blood, starting an IV, etc. Angela uses breaks in the preparation to work on the baby blanking she’s knitting. Angela OB/GYN, Dr. Susan Harvey, stops by around 9:00 am. We also meet anesthesiologists, Dr. Hans and resident Matt, who will be taking care of Angela during the operation. Rebecca produces a gown, hat, booties, and surgical mask for Jan to wear.
The first half of the operation goes smoothly. Around 9:40 we all file into the operating room. Matt puts the spinal block in, and there’s a general milling about of various nurses and doctors. Jan is sitting up by Angela’s head, with a little cloth sheet safely between our eyes and the action. There’s a short wait for Dr. Harvey’s assisting doctor to show up. We don’t even realize operation has officially started. Going in is apparently straightforward: “We’re just going through the layers now.” From somewhere the strains of easy listening radio can be heard. “We only get two stations.” Pixie is born to the disco-era sound of “Feels So Good” by Chuck Mangione. (In later life, she may demonstrate an inexplicable interest in the Flugelhorn.) Dr. Harvey tells Angela she’ll feel pressure on the top of her belly as they push down on it and squeeze Pixie out through the incision. Dr. Harvey: “We’ve got a cute something. It’s a… girl!” Nurse announces the official time of birth as 10:07 am. Two doctors standing by from NICU take baby and spend a long time poking her and doing tests. They measure her weight at 6 lbs. 0.7 ounces, and length at 18¾ inches. One eventually wraps little Pixie up and gives her to Jan to hold. They ask Jan if we’ve picked a name, but we haven’t made a final decision. Jan shows Pixie to Angela to see what she thinks, but she’s distracted with the operation.
The operation takes a couple of unexpected turns. Dr. Harvey had said closing up would take about twenty minutes or so, but the operating team doesn’t sound like a group of people wrapping something up—in fact, the level of activity is building. There’s a complication related to Angela’s pregnancy that’s causing issues. A lot of people move into action. Meanwhile, Jan’s holding Pixie while she makes cute little baby sounds. After about five minutes, Rebecca says, “Wait a sec”, listens carefully to Pixie, then says: “She’s flaring”. I.e., Pixie’s nostrils are flaring, indicating that Pixie is having trouble getting enough oxygen. The little “singing” sounds she’s making are further indication that’s having trouble getting oxygen. Rebecca takes Pixie back to a little table, then calls the two NICU doctors who have left to come right back. Rebecca’s having a bit of trouble getting an oxygen saturation sensor to stay on either of Pixie’s hands, and the other nurse in there is no help. Rebecca finally improvises and attaches the sensor to Pixie’s foot, and the sensor confirms that Pixie isn’t getting enough oxygen. They give her supplemental oxygen, which improves things. Meanwhile, they’re calling for some kind of machine, it arrives, it’s the wrong one, they shove it back into the hall and call for another.
Now there are two storms of activity: one centered on Angela and one on Pixie. Each one seems to be pulling in more drugs, machines, and people. There are at least ten people in the room talking back and forth, and more voices popping in on a speaker. No one seems to be showing any signs of real desperation. One of the people working on Pixie says nonchalantly, “Oh, sometimes these premature babies just have trouble going from fish to mammal.”
Dr. Harvey eventually announces that everything’s all good with Angela, and they close her up and bundle her out of the room and towards the recovery room. Pixie, meanwhile, is being transferred into a surgical isolette cart, a little plexiglass box on wheels with oxygen tanks and a bunch of machines hanging off it. Angela will later say that she was focused on what was going on with her own operation, and was largely unaware of everything going on with Pixie.
Post-op.
Jan goes up to the Neonatal ICU with Pixie. As best as they can tell, Pixie still has some amniotic fluid in her lungs, which is making it harder for her to breathe. She responds well to supplemental oxygen (“Ohs”, in NICU nurse parlance, as in O2). Pixie looks really cute. She even manages to look cute in a CPAP, a frankly terrifying-looking little mask that delivers oxygen under pressure to help open up the air sacs in her lungs. In the late afternoon, Anya and Liya get to come to the hospital to meet their new baby sister. Since Pixie’s lying in a plexiglass sort of bassinet and can’t be picked up or touched much, the whole baby sister concept is still a little abstract at the moment.
The day’s not over yet. Angela’s still really groggy so they take her off the IV narcotics and start an oral painkiller. At some point I run down to the garage to get our bags from the car, and on the way back I run into Steve, a neighbor in Madison Park. He’s there with his kids Jefferson and Caroline; his wife Rachel has just given birth to their third child (a girl, I think) this morning too. Back in the room Pastor Sherri is visiting. While she’s there, Angela begins to shiver. Sherri leaves. Angela suddenly is in serious pain. The pain gets worse and worse, we keep paging nurse, takes her a while to get to the room. She doesn’t know what to make of it. They put Angela back on the IV narcotics, she gets groggy again but at least is not in pain. E-moon brings me a dinner of take-out sushi, which turns out to be terrible. Mom brings Anya and Liya, we take them both upstairs to NICU, the nurse lets them both come in together with me. (I’m only supposed to go in with one visitor at a time.) Mom takes girls home and I go in separate car, put them to bed, and come back to the hospital to spend the night with Angela. I’d meant to send out a baby announcement and also post in our Cozi Family Journal, but don’t feel like celebrating yet, and in any event am too exhausted to write everything down.
Anya’s description of her new baby sister. Our nanny Jessie asked Anya what she thought of her baby sister. Anya’s reply: “She’s in a box. She has wires and funny hair.”
Sleeping in a tent. On Day Two we’re happy to learn that the amniotic fluid in Pixie’s lungs should disappear on its own in another day or so. Unfortunately, we also hear that a chest X-ray has revealed an air pocket which has formed outside of Pixie’s left lung (a “pneumothorax”). Apparently a small percentage of newborns spontaneously form a small hole in their lungs that leaks air. The theory is that a baby’s body generates some fairly extreme pressures to kick-start air breathing, and about 1–2% of the time this pressure creates a leak. Most of the time the leak closes on its own, and the baby shows no symptoms. In Pixie’s case, there’s a danger that leak could complicate her own existing respiratory issues. On the bright side, Pixie’s breathing has improved to the point where she doesn’t need to have oxygen delivered under pressure. They switch Pixie to a little plastic oxygen tent. The nurses also describe Pixie as rather “feisty”. She pulls at the wires attached to sensors monitoring her temperature, etc. When she gets really agitated, her breathing gets worse, so they add a sedative to her IV to keep her asleep and calm.
No Name Yet. People keep asking us what the baby’s name is. This is an awkward decision to make right now. With all three girls, we’ve wanted to meet the baby first to be sure we’ve got the right name. In Anya’s case, we knew immediately that she was an Anya. In Liya’s case, it took us about a day to be sure. With little baby Pixie, we can’t hold her or spend any real time up close with her. Angela has yet to even hold Pixie, and Jan only got to do so for about five minutes. This has made it hard to settle on a name. We do know we want to pick a name that ends with “ya”, so that all three sisters will share a character in the Chinese rendering of their names. Jan’s mom Lyn belongs to a writing group, and a nice member of that group named David Clowers wrote some words for the as-yet-unnamed Pixie. Many thanks to David for his kind poem:
No Name YetThe birth announcement said:
No name yet (but it will end in “ya”).
In German, that’s a simple, “Yes!” to a world
that greets this child like someone
so long missed that we had (almost) forgotten why
we needed them—until they came,
and then we knew that they
answered the question
that we were afraid to ask—
because we feared
we’d never get the answer
we needed them to be.
—David Clowers
At last, a name. This morning we awake and realize we’ve got the right name. We go up to the NICU a bit before noon so we can tell the baby her name is Sabriya Chen Miksovsky. “Bree” for short.
Holding Sabriya for first time. This morning the nurses feel like Sabriya is stable enough that we can hold her for the first time. This also means that we can finally start sharing photos of Sabriya without any CPAPs, oxygen tents, etc., in the way.
Sabriya is a cutie.
Big improvements. We visit in the NICU this afternoon and almost don’t recognize Sabriya’s bassinet because the oxygen tent had been removed. Her breathing has improved to the point where they can try her on just regular old room air. Yay! Since Sabriya’s body is pretty good at maintaining her body temperature, they’ve also switched off the heater above her bed. This means one less sensor and wire attached to her body. Yay!
The latest X-rays indicate that the air pocket outside her lung is getting smaller and smaller. Yay!
Anya can whistle. All the action swirling around Sabriya hasn’t stopped her older sisters Anya and Liya from making developments of their own. This afternoon Anya finally figured out how to whistle. She whistled one note over and over again.
Anya loses her first tooth. More developments on the home front! This evening Anya was playing piano with grandma Lyn, when Anya’s first loose tooth finally popped out. She raced upstairs to show it to Jan.
Angela comes back from the hospital. Angela’s recovered enough from her C-section that she can walk slowly around on her own, and can come back from the hospital. Anya and Liya are delighted to have her back at home! Sabriya will stay at Swedish for a while longer. Once her respiratory issues are under control, the nurses will move on to the challenge of teaching Sabriya how to eat, which will probably a couple of weeks.
One step sideways. Angela and Lyn go to the hospital this evening to check on Sabriya. They find that Sabriya’s been moved into an isolette (plastic box) to help regulate her temperature. Not exactly terrible news, but it’s still surprising, since we’d thought she’d sort of mastered the whole body temperature regulation thing. On the plus side, for the first time they feed Sabriya real food (breast milk), administering it through a feeding tube. Guess where the tube goes in? Her nose!
Sabriya graduates from NICU to “Step Down” nursery. Angela gets a call around 8:30 this evening from the NICU with some good news: Sabriya has made some big strides today—and as a reward gets to leave the NICU! The nurse says Bree has slowed down her rate of breathing to somewhat normal levels, although she can still spike a bit. She also took a bottle in the afternoon, which is a big step. Generally speaking, they feel like she no longer requires the full-court intensive care of the NICU. They’re moving her to the “Step Down” nursery where babies can resolve things like eating issues, grow a bit, and generally get ready to transition home. Whew. Jan gets to the hospital shortly before 9:00 to be there for the move. He helps change Sabriya’s diaper (20 diapers down, 6980 to go!) and gets to feed her a bottle, which she polishes off. She’s still pretty sleepy, hopefully just recovering from the last few days’ trauma. At 9:30 he helps the nurse move her down to her new home in the Infant Special Care Unit. It’s quieter there, and at this time of the night, pretty dark. The NICU, in contrast, is like baby Las Vegas: constant light levels, no sense of the time of day, and a background sound track of pinging machines.
More improvements. Liya holds her new baby sister for the first time. Liya’s a natural caregiver, and instinctively patted Sabriya on the back. Today Sabriya continues to make strides. She’s done a great job eating from a bottle, so they no longer need to give her fluids through an IV. At noon they remove the IV, which means one fewer wire/tube/thing hanging off of her! We can’t wait until the day she gets to be just an unadorned baby. Bree also began trying to breastfeed today.
Anya’s turn to hold her baby sister for the first time. No feeding tube anymore!
Sabriya comes home!!! Yesterday we’d heard from a nurse in the Infant Special Care Unit that Sabriya had been cleared to come home—pending a doctor’s final approval this morning. We spend this morning on pins and needles, and call several times during the morning to see if the doctor’s done their rounds yet. In the late morning we finally get confirmation that Sabriya can finally come home.
There’s a bunch of stuff we have to do actually get her discharged: forms, car seat safety check, more forms, ID bracelet check, removal of the sensors and other gear they’ve got on her, car seat safety lecture, and another form or two. We’d been told to bring clothes to take her home in, but the smallest outfit we’ve brought is huge on little Bree. We finally settle on a onesie and socks, but the socks are also way too big. The nurse finally takes pity on us and raids the unit’s premie wardrobe to produce two little micro-socks that would fit comfortably on your thumb.
And at 5½ pounds, she makes even the infant car seat look huge. We cinch up the straps as far as they’ll go, but they’re still too big. The nurse has to help us figure out how to redo the straps so they can tighten up even further. We’re finally left with little more than the buckles.
Thanks for all your kind thoughts. Stand down red alert. All is well. Whew.
Family of Five.
Walk down the block. Angela’s been told she should try walking more to recover faster from the C-section, so we take Sabriya out for her first walk in the neighborhood. Angela claims a destination will help her: Tully’s Coffee. (We would have gone to Starbucks, but it’s a block farther.) Bree sleeps through the whole thing.
Angela channels Anne Geddes, thanks to models Sabriya & Jan…
Liya jumped off a diving board today. The girls are in swimming lessons each morning. Liya’s done so well that she’s been bumped up from the three year old class to the next level. Today everyone in her class had a chance to jump into the pool from a starting block, the top of which was several feet above the surface of the pool. Liya had no problem with this. The class then had the opportunity to try jumping in from a real diving board, which was pretty high, maybe five feet or so. Several of the kids in Liya’s class walked out to the edge of the board, but they all turned back—except Liya. She jumped in! “I was a little scared”, she said.
This evening Jan and Anya played “Robot”, a game Anya loves to play from time to time. They each take turns playing the part of a particularly stupid and literal-minded robot, and the other person has to try to get the robot to do something (usually to retrieve a rubber ducky). When Anya says, “Turn!”, and Jan turns the opposite direction than the one Anya intended, or turns past the obvious stopping point, Anya laughs hysterically. Anya’s gradually figuring out how to give directions like, “Turn left a quarter turn.” Tonight she was so caught up in the game that she gave up her story time so she could keep playing Robot.
Only a small step from there to LOGO programming… :)
Anya and Jan made up a nonsense number system while waiting for their lunch to arrive. Jan took Anya to a group playdate sponsored by her upcoming kindergarten class. The playdate was held at Woodland Park Playground on Phinney Ridge, so afterwards they ate lunch at Mae’s Café. Lunch took forever to arrive. Anya and Liya like making up nonsense words these days, and while waiting for lunch, Anya started to make up new words. Someone she ended up declaring that the word “La-doh” meant “one hair of head standing up on top of your head”. She then simplified this to mean just the number “one”. Anya and Jan eventually made up more numbers:
1: La-doh
2: Zhee-doh
3: Gree-doh
4: Zoh-doh
5: Doh-doh
6: Ji-doh
7: Boh-doh
8: Ma-doh
9: Moo-doh
10: Oo-doh
They later added “No-doh” for zero. Jan also proposed a refinement by which the suffix “-doh” meant ones, “-dee” meant tens, and “-doo” meant hundreds. So, “Ma-doo Zoh-dee Boh-doh” = 847. Anya thought this was hilarious.
Our lunch eventually arrived… after about zhee-dee doh-doh minutes.
Angela’s able to walk around a little bit more each day. Yesterday she walked down the block to the Red Apple market and bought groceries. Today she rested from that trip.
Sabriya’s doing well. In particular, she’s started to eat a lot more. We’d been stockpiling a lot of milk in the freezer, but now Bree’s working her way through all of that.
When Sabriya’s hungry, she’ll chomp on just about anything:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie5S1HSNXM8
We took the girls (all three!) with us to Essential Bakery for lunch—our first outing as a family of five!
Angela finished knitting her baby blanket this morning. Before she finished, she could tell that she’d miscounted stitches, particularly at the beginning, so we were kind of expecting a trapezoidal blanket. The end result was more startling that we had expected. The consensus is that the blanket looks like a manta ray.