Blessing

My mom made a blessing dress for Allie, but since she came so early, the dress was way too big. So I made her a smaller one. That's Joey's hand holding the hanger for me :) The headband and bracelet my mom made were adorable

The Fam

Surgery

I was changing Allie's diaper a few weeks ago and discovered a huge lump in her groin area. I freaked out, raced her to the doctor's office. I was really relieved to find out it was a hernia. Hernias are no big deal. Except in girls it can cause damage to the ovaries, so she had to get it fixed, which meant surgery.

The thing that probably worried me most was that she couldn't eat for 4 hours before we arrived, and then it would be another hour before the surgery, so 5 hours without eating. That's kind of a big deal for a 3 month old baby. But she actually did really well. She slept until about half an hour before they started, and she only got a little fussy right before they took her in.

I was afraid they were going to take her and give her an IV, and she'd be screaming because they'd have a hard time getting it in because she's so little. But they gave her some gas to put her to sleep, then did the IV, so I was really happy about that. She wore this cute little hospital gown. And these are the smallest pants they had. A couple of the nurses assumed she was a boy because she was wearing blue. :)

After surgery, she slept like a log. She woke up about once an hour and gave a really sad cry, then went back to sleep. She didn't wake up enough to eat until late afternoon. I thought my chest was going to explode. Once the anesthesia wore off, she was in a lot of pain, and was inconsolable. They gave her a tiny dose of morphine, and she was much happier after that. By the next afternoon she was totally fine, didn't even need Tylenol.This is the incision, they didn't do stitches, just used some sort of glue. Normally they do it laproscopically, through the belly button, but the instruments were too big for such a tiny girl. As a side note, check out her belly button--it's huge! It was also herniated when whe was born, but it fixed itself. It's still huge, though. Her doctor said, "At least you won't have to worry about her wanting to wear a bikini!"So everything turned out just fine. I was really worried about it, but everything worked out great. Since she was so little she had to stay overnight. I stayed with her and Jared stayed with the boys. I actually enjoyed my time there. I had no dishes to wash, or meals to prepare, I just sat by her bed and watched movies and fed my new obsession: making headbands.

A lot of memories came flooding back, since she was right down the hall from the NICU. It reminded me again of how grateful I am that she is safe and healthy.

Smiles

I took this picture of Allie. So cute! As I looked at it I thought her smile looked familiar . . . Not Tyler. I don't think they look anything alike.

Not Jason. Although they do have the same blue eyes.

This is me when I was a baby. Getting closer . . .

Aha! That's where I've seen that smile before. I guess she looks like Baby Joey. And actually she reminds me of Joey a lot. She's a high maintenance baby, she wants to be held all the time, and that's how he was. And she smiles a lot, just like he did.

It was fun going through old pictures. It goes by so fast!

School is back in session. Jason is in Grade 1 and has to go ALL DAY now. I thought it would be hard for him, but the 2 recesses, plus lunch and lunch recess softened the blow. He is thrilled with eating lunch at school. Joey's in grade 5. So far so good. He keeps forgetting to bring his homework home, though, which had dire consequences: no video games. He suffers.

Tyler didn't start kindergarted until a week after his brothers. I took him to Thanksgiving Point to Farm Country on a $2 Tuesday. He loves animals, and I thought it would be a blast. In reality is was barely worth the 2 bucks. It's just not very fun to look at a pig or a chicken or rabbit when you don't even get to pet it. He did get to feed the ducks, and that was the highlight of the trip. Or maybe the popcorn was.

The wagon ride, with Allie in the picture on his request. Isn't he the cutest little boy ever? Tyler likes school, too. He kept saying he didn't want to go, though. On the first day all the kids lined up in front of the kindergarten room door. I remembered last year when Jason went that half the kids were crying, some trying to run away, there was a lot of drama. And I was noticing that none of the kids were upset this year. Then I realized Tyler was crying. Oops! He got over it quick, though.

Allie is growing like crazy--she's about 8 pounds now :)

She is smiling now, which is ADORABLE. And also hard to capture. She gets really interested in the camera and quits smiling.

And she has adorable feet nowadays, thanks to Auntie Betty

She's a pain in the neck, like all babies. :)

But we adore her.

Home at Last

Her first picture without the NG tube.
That red mark on her head is a hemangioma, which is a cluster of extra blood vessels. It's basically a birthmark that will go away someday, but it might get much bigger before it goes away. I'm hoping it stays tiny! Luckily she's a girl and I can put a bow over it. It felt so good to hold her without wires and tubes, and no alarms beeping at us.

Strapped in for the ride home. We laughed when we put her in because she was so small in the carseat.Now Joey and Tyler can hold her to their hearts content. They have to take turns, though, much to their annoyance. They want her all to themselves. Jason still won't hold her.It's such a great feeling to have my kids all safely gathered. When I was at home I thought about her constantly, and wanted to be with her. When I was at the hospital with her I was thinking about Jared and the boys, and wanted to be home with them. My mind is at ease now.

Allie

When I went to see Allie she was sound asleep. I thought she looked a lot like Tyler when he was a baby. But when I went home and looked at his newborn picture I realized how FAT he was!! Really, it's not that he was fat, it's just that she's so darn skinny!

Look at him, he was huge. And he really wasn't huge, he was only 6 1/2 pounds. That's not a big baby.

So little.

And just to show you how adorable she is:

I can't get enough of her.

No I can not.

Baby Allie is here

Here is the newest addition to the Moore family:

Baby Allie. Her arrival was not at all the way we expected.
Last week, on Wednesday and Thursday I was feeling really crummy. My stomach hurt and I was nauseated, and just felt lousy. Our boys were in Colorado with Jared's mom and dad, and we were going to pick them up on Friday. On Friday morning I woke up feeling crappy still, and decided that all these symptoms were probably big red flags, telling me there was something wrong. I had flashbacks to 9 years ago, laying on my bed one saturday morning, crying as I called Jared at work, telling him I just didn't feel good. On that day we went to the emergency room, and later that day I gave birth to Joey, because I had Toxemia.
I asked Jared to take my blood pressure (handy, having a nursing student around) knowing that if it was high, we were headed down that road again. It was high. I was really upset. We went to the hospital, and after waiting all day, a doctor told me it was toxemia, and if it got any worse they would induce and I would have the baby immediately. If we could hold off for 48 hours it would be ideal, though, because I could get steroid shots to strengthen the baby's lungs. My doctor was in Hawaii on vacation. When he got back (Sunday) he said he thought it might actually be my gallbladder, not toxemia. So we did ultrasounds, and more tests. Turns out it was toxemia after all, so on Monday afternoon I got the Pitocin going, and Magnesium Sulfate, which stops me from having seizures, which I was at high risk for, and could kill me. I know, very scary stuff. My body didn't want to give up this baby. Magnesium sulfate is something they use to stop premature labor. You see the problem here? I might also mention it makes you feel really crappy. I have never been so miserable in all my life. I was so weak and drugged I couldn't lift my arm. I was terrified about having my baby six weeks early. It was the worst 5 days of our lives. But on Tuesday morning, after 17 hours of weird labor, Allie was born. She was so tiny! In my drugged state of mind I asked the doctor if I tore, and did I need stitches? He looked at me like I was crazy, and said that my birth canal never knew there was a baby in it. She was the ugliest and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. She was slimy and purple, and squashed. But she was my baby, and I loved her instantly. They whisked her out to the NICU, and Jared went with her, and she was having a hard time breathing. It was really scary for him, watching his daughter fighting for life, and didn't help that he understood all the medical jargon they were using.

She was 3 pounds, 12 ounces. Even for a 34 week old baby she is tiny. But she only needed help breathing for an hour, then she was fine. She has been doing great every day. She is fed through a tube that goes through her nose into her stomache. They increase the amount every 12 hours, as long as she tolerates is, and she is almost up to the full amount she needs. Today she got her IVs out, and probably tomorrow she won't need the bilirubin lights anymore. She just has to be able to eat on her own, then she can come home. That will probably take some time though, maybe a few weeks. It is difficult for babies born so early to figure out how to suck and swallow, and it takes a lot of their energy. So we try a little bit at a time, and slowly she will figure things out.

At first it was okay that she was in the hospital, I was so weak and my body had been through quite the ordeal, It was nice I didn't have a baby to take care of. Now it makes me sad to put her in her "E.T. bed" as Jared calls it, and leave her there. I want her home with me. It also makes me sad that my boys can't go see her. They can only go on weekends. They've seen her once. Tyler really liked her. He touched her feet and looked at her, and was very interested in his new baby sister, "Owie." That's how he says Allie. LOVE it. Jason just looked at her, didn't want to touch her. He thinks we should keep her, though. Joey could not get enough of her. he asked if he could go see her again the next day, and I told him yes, (not knowing that he couldn't) and he just lit up. He was upset when he found out he couldn't go. he said it's like they have an age line around the NICU, like in Harry Potter, how there's an age line around the goblet of fire, and oly 17 year olds can get through. If only he could get his hands on an aging potion.

So she is here, safe and sound. After the delivery the doctor showed me the umbilical cord; there was a tight knot in it, and my placenta was beginning to calcify. He said there is no doubt in his mind that she would not have made it to full term. She would not have survived with a knot like that. I'm so grateful that God is in charge, and that he took such good care of me and Allie. We don't always know why things happen, but in this case we do. Everything turned out perfectly.