Journal 10

She's Finally Here

And a few weeks early to boot. Violet Eve Lapham was born on the 15th of August at 8:40pm. Samantha and I are exhausted.














It was an adventure to be sure. Late Monday night/Tuesday morning Samantha wasn't feeling well, shaking and nauseous, so we took her into the hospital. They couldn't tell us exactly what was going on, but surmised that she'd caught a flu bug or such that was exaggerated since she was pregnant. And it had brought on labor. After a sleepless night and an easy delivery, we had our baby girl in our arms the next evening. Violet was four weeks early and weighed in at a petite but healthy 5 pounds, 12.9 ounces. Little did we know the adventure was only half over.

Since she was early Violet was slow to take to feeding and had some mild jaundice. She spent the rest of the week in the nursery under bili lights, while we moved from hospital room to hospital room, eating cafeteria food and going up to feed her every two to three hours.

By Saturday Violet was starting to breast feed, though Samantha's milk still hadn't come in, and her bilirubin levels were dropping so they finally let us take her home. She seemed to be doing very well. Samantha's milk came in when we got home and little Violet made her feel like a vending machine for the next few days. Unfortunately, her bilirubins have spiked back up since then and we've got her wrapped in a fiber optic bili blanket most of the time. This has the eerie effect of turning her into a glow worm when she sleeps, with strange blue light leaking out of her blanket and bassinet. She had another checkup yesterday, and despite the bilis, she has a perfectly clean and encouraging bill of health in all other regards. We're going back in tomorrow and hopefully her levels will have dropped by then.

It's certainly been a week, a long, tiring, frustrating, happy week. We're both worn out, but we wouldn't trade this for anything.

That's all for now. I've got some exciting new projects starting up as well, but that will have to wait until next week (assuming I can manage work and little miss at the same time, we'll see).

Take care,
Daniel