Blog’s Out for Summer… But not Forever

It has been a busy five months.  First off, you are probably wondering what happened to our little Baby Wookie. (Auto correct doesn’t recognize “Wookie”. What kind of a nerd doesn’t include Star Wars terms in the auto correct dictionary?)

I inadvertently took an extended summer vacation from the blog without really meaning to.  Oops!  I am planning to do the next several posts as “catch up” posts written after the fact.  I’m not always great with my keeping my tense consistent and writing about the past as if it were the present will probably make things even worse.  Grammar fascists, you have been warned.

Baby Wookie Update

Let me apologize for leaving things in a rather cliff hanger state for so long. (No, Jon Lithgow is not forcing Sylvester Stallone to climb a mountain to recover… something.  Maybe mint plates to make counterfeit money?  Maybe a lot of money?  I don’t remember.)

So first off, little boy did recover from his pneumonia symptoms.  It is pretty common for this to happen with premature babies.  It is also very common for them to have to go home on oxygen to treat sleep apnea.

If you look closely at the picture above, you can see that has a little plastic tube sticking out the back of his head. That’s his oxygen tube and it is connected to a massive oxygen tank.

He also had a monitor attached to his foot as can be seen in this picture of little boy doing his best impression of Trinity from the first scene of The Matrix in froggy pajamas that were probably too big for him.  

This hasn’t stopped our little Ewok from being pretty adorable though.

Some Challenges of a Premature Baby Wookie

Another challenge was even finding clothes for a premature infant.  My wife bought out the local Carter’s of all preemie clothes – all two outfits.  Since his invitation to the Queen’s Birthday Gala got lost in the mail, this ended up not being too much of an issue.

And if you were wondering what that big white thing is on his chest (and even if you weren’t) that is a motion monitor we bought to make sure he keeps breathing.  In all honesty, I think this was as much for us (no more “IS HE BREATHING!?”-waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night incidents, and only one false alarm) as it was for him.  It came as part of a baby monitor, which we hadn’t used with our previous placements.

I Can’t Wait for this Kid to go Wireless

Having a premature infant on oxygen does offer some challenges.  The main one is that they are tethered to the oxygen tank and the monitor.  There were mobility options.  We had portable oxygen tanks and the monitor had a battery that would last a few hours, so we could take him places.  But when we did, it was a bit of an ordeal.  You sling the oxygen over one shoulder, the monitor over the other and, oh yeah, don’t forget the baby.

I think the worst bit was worrying about stepping on either the tube or the wire and hurting his foot or his head.  We managed to avoid this, but I have to say that I had several nightmares about it.

I can’t remember for sure, but it was at least two months and might have even been three before he was able to go completely cordless.  

Tai Chi Master

Even when he was teeny tiny, little boy showed a lot of personality.  It is a shame that I can’t show his face in pictures that are posted publicly.  It was pretty common for him to strike a pose.

His ability to regularly pose in seemingly Kung Fu and/or Tai Chi poses earned him the title of Sifu Crabby Pants for a while (mainly because he had a few outfits that had crabs on the pants, not because he was a particularly crabby baby).  We went through lots of nicknames – Baby Wookie, Baby Groot, Baby Ewok, Yubnub (the Ewok word for ‘Hurray!’ according to The Complete Wermos Guide and a lyric found in the original song at the conclusion of Return of the Jedi.) and some others.  I’ll save which nickname stuck for a future post as an incentive to keep reading these things.