November 30, 2008: Liesl Comes Home

My only plans for the day included sleeping in and spending the day at the hospital being ready for whatever might come up.  I slept in until around around nine thirty and then went straight into the hospital to spend the day with Dominica.  I was just on my way out the door when she called to let me know that the NICU pediatrician was making rounds and that it would be good if I could get there to be there when discussing Liesl.

Dominica and Liesl Leaving the Hospital

It was before eleven when I got to the hospital and got about fifteen minutes to visit with Dominica before the charge nurse stopped in to let us know that all of the tests had come back clean and that there was no continuing fear of meningitis (we had found out last night that the tests for sepsis were clean.)  Shortly thereafter the pediatrician came by and filled us in on the details although there are very few since the end result is that all of the tests are good and Liesl is extremely healthy (she also got 9/9 on her Apgar scores.)

The other item of concern was her bilirubin levels which had been 11.3 yesterday morning and 11.7 in the evening.  So there was concern that those levels would get too high and that Liesl would need to stay in the NICU longer in order to receive light treatments, but this morning the levels had fallen to 10 and she was clear to come home.

We left the hospital with Liesl around one thirty in the afternoon.  I had to make several trips to the car to get everything loaded up as Dominica’s hospital room was pretty full of stuff.  Then we brought Dominica and Liesl down to the main entrance of Hudson Valley Hospital Center in a wheelchair and I brought the car around the circle to pick them up.  It was cold and rainy so we really wanted to minimize the time spend outside.

We got Liesl home and spent the afternoon and evening just hanging out with her in the living room.  Oreo really wasn’t interested in her at all and didn’t even come over to say hello.  He was extremely glad to see Dominica though.  He had to spend a ton of time just sucking on one of his binkies because he was so excited.

This afternoon is the first time that Liesl and Dominica’s father really get a chance to hang out.  Frank had a cold while Liesl was in the hospital so he could not go in to the NICU to visit her and she could not come out to see anyone.  So he only really saw her right when she was born and brought out to see Dominica.

We tried to put Liesl into her swing tonight but quickly discovered that the swing was broken and doesn’t do the swinging action.  This qualifies as a minor disaster as the swing was supposed to be the place where Liesl would go to sleep when no one was holding her.  Now we have to find a Buy Buy Baby and get out there and get this replaced as quickly as possible.  We are really sorry that we didn’t test this out before now.  It never occurred to us that it wouldn’t work.

I played some Fable 2 while Liesl was sleeping and eating.  I didn’t get to play much but I have started using the real estate feature to buy up buildings in the game in the hopes that I will be making money during the times when I don’t get to play.  It is a pretty neat feature of the game.  I am enjoying Fable 2 so much that I decided that I needed to go back and play the original.  So I have Fable: The Lost Chapters coming from eBay.

We watched some Hulu or Netflix on the PS3 and then around ten or ten thirty Dominica and I took Liesl upstairs in the hopes of getting some sleep.

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