Sheep Guarding Llama

Luciana enters her second day today and is happy and healthy and far, far more relaxed than her uber-hyper older sister.  Liesl is louder and more rambunctious than Luciana by quite a margin.  They may look similar but we can already see some serious differences in personality and Luciana is only on day two.  To be fair, though, Liesl was born at 41 weeks and Luciana at just 39.  Those last two weeks make for an awful lot of development.  The size and strength difference alone is significant.  Luciana was healthy but Liesl was thinking about crawling that first day (well, at least holding up her head and looking around.)

This morning I got up and got to work trying to catch up as much as possible from yesterday.  Dominica’s parents got up and took Liesl into the hospital this morning so she is not alone and I have the house to myself so that I can be productive for the morning.  Everyone is doing pretty well this morning.

At noon I headed in to the hospital to join everyone.  On my way in I swung in to downtown Carrollton to find Vintage House, the local Vera Bradley store.  Dominica has been wanting the Vera Bradley Mother’s Day bracelet that released yesterday morning and that is only available for a very limited time.  It turns out that Dominica did not realize that the bracelet is not available online and can only be purchased from participating Vera Bradley stores so when she told me that she expected me to get up early yesterday and find it for her, she did not understand that she was sending me physically out attempting to find it.

I did pretty well, though, I was able to find the store and pick out a bracelet for her.  Then I hit Jack in the Box and headed on in to the hospital.

I brought my laptop with me so that I could work from the hospital but, for some reason, neither Dominica nor my laptops are able to connect to the hospital’s weird WiFi.  The iPhone connects to it but when it is connected it cannot get email or do anything but surf the web.  Clearly they are blocking all non-web protocols which is pretty ridiculous – why would they attempt to block hospital patients from emailing people?  If anything, isn’t that the most important function that they would need Internet access for and web browsing just secondary?  So I’ve been using my iPhone on 3G the last two days just because it works better than the WiFi in the hospital.  But now we realize that our laptops (Windows 7) are useless here.  This meant that I couldn’t stay for very long at the hospital and had to run back to the house to work.  That really sucked.  We had been planning on me working from the hospital.  I took Dominica’s laptop home too since she wasn’t going to be able to use it.  That was probably the worst part – she was unable to use her laptop for entertainment while stuck in the hospital.

I came home with Liesl who was very tired and bored from being in the hospital and put her to bed while I worked for several hours.  Once Liesl woke up I took her back to the hospital to spend the evening with Dominica and Luciana.  Liesl was pretty bored after having been at the hospital yesterday and all day today.  Since everything but the web is blocked things like Netflix aren’t an option to keep her occupied either.  Luckily the iPad was loaded with some existing videos that she was able to watch.  Today she decided that she was in to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” which seems pretty weird to me.  She found it and picked it out all by herself.  She is way past the point of needing us to help her use the iPad for much of anything, especially not watching movies.

We stayed probably a bit too late as Liesl was going crazy by the end.  We tried watching some Disney Channel but there was nothing on that interested her and the tiny television high on the wall was nearly impossible to watch if you were not in the hospital bed.

Luciana is doing really well after day two and it is expected that she and Dominica will be getting discharged tomorrow morning around eleven.  We will find out for sure in the morning.

Dominica is really lonely in the hospital and really wants to come home.  Hopefully nothing goes wrong so that she can come home tomorrow.  She will be very upset if she gets stuck at the hospital for another day – especially as tomorrow is the last day that her parents will be in Texas helping us out.

Liesl and I got home pretty late – probably after midnight.  And it was straight off to bed.  Liesl was super helpful again tonight.  She is really being just so perfect putting up with her mommy being away and all of the change going on.  I can’t believe how good she is being.

Tonight she got in to bed and was playing with her toy phone.  The phone is meant for kids much younger but she has taken a liking to it which is pretty funny.  She does much more advanced play with it, though, and tonight I found her having an entire conversation on it where she was explaining about her day and the baby and hospital and everything.  I asked her if she was talking to Aunt Checka and she said yes.  I told her to tell her bye bye so that she could brush her teeth.  “Bye bye, Aunt Checka” she said and hung up the phone and brushed her teeth.

Then, after she was done brushing her teeth, she called each of her cousins in succession saying “Hello Garrett, what are you doing?  Okay, bye bye.” and going on to the next cousin.  It was so cute.  She even told me that Emily’s phone number was “123”.  We were quite surprised that Liesl understands the concept of phone numbers already.  Considering how little we use the phone (we use email, instant messenger, etc. instead) that was quite amazing.

As Luciana is doing so well at this point, we have reservations for La Cima for Mother’s Day.  We are hopeful that we will be able to make it.  Missing brunches at La Cima is a tragic thing indeed.

Last night turned into the night of no sleep for the Miller household.  Dominica went to bed before nine with Liesl and at least they managed to catch a very small nap during that time – but it was very, very small indeed.  Dominica was anxious about today and could not sleep.  Liesl does not sleep well unless everyone else is sleeping.

Oreo and I stayed up in the office working, mostly catching up on SGL posts, until ten thirty or maybe eleven.  I wasn’t too tired until then and really wanted to be caught up before today.  There would be no catching up if I let it go and people would be reading the site and feeds a lot today so I wanted to be as ready as possible.

When I first took Oreo to go outside for his final walk it was nice and clear out.  He stopped, as he often does, and spent five minutes itching himself rather than going out for his walk when I asked.  During that time a storm whipped up and he decided that he would not go out as it was pouring.  Grrr.  Now I just know that there will be getting up in the middle of the night for him.

So at around eleven Oreo and I made it to bed.  It was only until half past midnight until Oreo was out of bed and restless.  This, of course, woke me up as I am always monitoring him at night to make sure that he has not fallen or hurt himself or that he does not need me in some way.  He is an old dog and needs attention to keep him safe.

Oreo ended up keeping me awake until a quarter after one when I finally got up to take him out.  At that point I decided that having only two more hours until my alarm was going to go off meant that attempting to go back to sleep would just make things worse.  So Oreo and I returned to the office and I continued to catch up on SGL until three in the morning when I went and took my shower and got dressed to go to the hospital.

It turned out that Dominica and Liesl were pretty much awake all night as well.  Dominica had been up before Oreo got me up but had gone back to bed.  Liesl but a little sleep but was restless.  After I went to the office apparently she cried for me to come back.  I hung out with Liesl and tried to get her to go back to sleep while Dominica showered and got ready to go to the hospital but Liesl would have none of it.  Before we left we just ended up putting on a DVD on repeat so that she could sit in bed and watch something rather than waking everyone else up.

It was four forty two when Dominica and I loaded into the Acadia and headed down to Irving.  There was no traffic at all at that time of the morning so we zipped right down to the hospital and arrived quite a bit early since we were not required to be there until five thirty.  Even getting there on time would be quite early since the surgery was scheduled for seven thirty but they want plenty of time to do the check in paperwork and other prep work.

Liesl got upset that her parents were not home around five thirty and started calling for her mommy.  Aunt Francesca and Grammy went running to get her.  They set her up in the living room and she was mostly okay after that.

At seven, Dominica’s parents and Francesca drove down to the hospital in the hopes of getting to see Dominica before she headed into surgery.  They ended up making it in plenty of time.  We were told that we would head down to surgery around a quarter after seven but it was around eight thirty before anyone came to get us so they had a lot of time to spend with Dominica before we went down.  It turned out that our doctor was running late and because of that we were bumped for another surgery that was scheduled to be after us.

Once we went down for the surgery Dominica was taken in for prep and I was left in a hallway for quite a long time wondering what was going on.  It seemed like forever but was probably just half an hour to forty five minutes.  Later I learned that Dominica’s anesthesiologist was having major issues finding her spine because of the bend in her back and they were fearful that they were going to have to put her under in order to do the surgery.  They did eventually managed to get the needle into her spine and all was well from that perspective and they ran out to get me and I was in the surgery room for only a few minutes before the anesthesiologist had me stand up to see our new baby girl being born!

Luciana Francesca Miller was born at ~9:03 in the morning, central time, 7 pounds 6 ounces and 20.5 inches.  Right away, though, we had to rush her into the NICU as she was having respiratory distress.  Dominica only got to see her for a few seconds before we had to rush her away.  We had just enough time to make sure that Dominica was doing okay before we had to go.  She, Luciana,  had been crying very hard and the nurses handed her to me to take her to the NICU.  Immediately she stopped crying – they were all very impressed.

We got her to the NICU which was just down the hall and her oxygen levels were down to 84%, not good at all.  They start to worry beneath 95%.  So she was not doing very well.  Once she started to calm down, though, with me talking to her her oxygen began to climb and soon she was out of the oxygen deprivation zone.  They were concerned about how hard she was working in order to get her air but were hopeful that it was just caused by there being some fluid in her lungs that she would work out shortly.  This is not uncommon but it warranted observation and an X-ray.

Once we knew that Luciana was out of the woods I went out to the waiting area to let Dominica’s family know the current status and to call my father too and then to post the Twitter updates.  I was very good about Twittering all morning.  Lot’s of people following me closely today.  Twitter, FaceBook, FourSquare, Flickr and SGL all in full swing.

By the time that I got back in to the NICU Dominica was being wheeled into her recovery area so I was able to go see her again.  She was in rough shape but recovering well and definitely looking for news on Luciana after she had to be whisked to the NICU.  Luciana was continuing to improve and her oxygen had finally reached 100%.  Eventually the X-ray showed that there was just some fluid and they felt that she was working it out slowly.

It took about an hour of Dominica in recovery and Luciana in the NICU before they decided that Luciana could have a bath and, in about an hour, would probably be released.  So I went out and updated the family who had been stuck sitting with no real information for quite some time.  Dominica was moved shortly to her final room so we were all able to go in and join her there.

It was not very long before Luciana was brought in to meet everyone too.  There were pictures taken earlier and more taken now along with a few videos that all have been uploaded to Flickr.  I am very thankful for the new iPhone 4 that I got just two days ago because we were able to quickly take good pictures and upload to Flickr without a problem.  Had I still been on the BlackBerry I would have probably run out of battery and would not have gotten any video, the pictures would have been much worse and only a few would have been able to have been uploaded.  The Lord really watched over us on that one on such an important day.  I would have been really upset to have gotten this phone sometime later.

In the early afternoon Francesca, Dominica’s mother and I went back to the house.  Francesca had to get her family packed up so that they could get back down to Houston and Dominica’s mom just turned around, grabbed the other car and returned to the hospital.  Bennie had been at the house taking care of the kids all morning.  He had to be exhausted by that point.

Liesl was running on nearly zero sleep and way, way, way too much sugar.  It was time to get her to a nap.  She is so tired that she is delirious and out of control.  She went ballistic because she was out of Pez.  She was screaming at the Pez dispenser.  It was not a good scene.

I took Liesl, kicking and screaming, and put her into our bed.  She was very upset and immediately started climbing out of bed.  I knew that she would not put up a fight for long so just closed the door and headed to the kitchen.  Before I even reached the kitchen, all was silent.  I returned a few minutes later to check in on her and found her lying on the floor on my side of the bed where she had fallen off of it – fast asleep.  So I let her lie there rather than risking waking her up to put her back in the bed right away.

The Grices were on the road shortly and Dominica’s mother was back to the hospital.  I wrapped up a few tasked that needed my attention – mostly charging the phone, posting more updates, sending emails and the like and then went in to take a nap myself.  I picked Liesl up and placed her back into bed.  She got upset again when she woke up and threw a short-lived tantrum but was asleep within ten minutes and the two of us napped for several hours which we both desperately needed.

When we woke up Liesl was in a better mood and I was coherent.  I talked to Liesl about her baby sister but that did not go well.  She got very upset and was screaming at me that she did not want a baby sister and was hitting me a lot.  But then I took her to the computer and showed her pictures of Luciana and she got get excited and decided that she really wanted to go to the hospital and meet her new baby sister.  She has even started trying to say Luciana’s name.  She is doing well at it and sometimes nearly has it and at other times says “nonuchana”.

We drove down to the hospital so that Liesl could see Dominica and meet Luciana arriving there around eight.  It took a long time to nap and then get all prepped to get down there.  I grabbed some quick McDonald’s on the way as I had very little food all day.  I had managed to grab a bite at six thirty in the morning while Dominica was doing some of the admittance paperwork but that was about it.

We got to the hospital and Dominica’s parents left shortly thereafter.  They had been in a hurry for us to arrive and relieve them so that they could go out and get some food.  Liesl was  a perfect angel all evening.  Ever since she saw the pictures of Luciana she was the best toddler any parent could ever hope to have.  She was pleasant and helpful all night.

Liesl was very excited to meet Luciana.  She kept wanting to get as close as possible and would stand on my lap so that she could look down in to the bassinet.  Liesl liked to rub her hand against Luciana’s cheek, just like I always did to Liesl.

Liesl and I went home getting back to the house around midnight.  Liesl was super helpful in getting ready for bed.  She didn’t fight at all like she often does and happily put on her pajamas, brushed her teeth and got into bed.  She didn’t need all of her toys and did not ask to watch anything.  She was as good as a toddler could possibly be.

Tomorrow I will be working part of the day and at the hospital part of the day.  Dominica’s parents are planning to get up in the morning and take Liesl in to see Dominica and Luciana while I get some work done.

We are heading out to the hospital at 4:40am today.  I am already awake and getting SGL completely up to date so that there is nothing that people are missing before we go in.  To follow along with the latest in baby news watch the Twitter feed (@scottalanmiller) and watch the Flickr feed.  In theory I should be able to post updates all morning from the new iPhone which is fully charged and ready to go.  I tested everything out yesterday and we should be good to go.  Both should show up automatically on the left side bar here on SGL, but just in case, use the links.  FaceBook will have some info but Twitter and Flickr are the definitive sources.

Dominica and I have been up pretty early each of the last two days.  This is good since tomorrow we have to be up really, really early to get to the hospital.  Our brunch seating at La Cima is at ten thirty this morning and with this many people (thirteen) to get showered, dressed, loaded into cars and driven over there we need some serious time to pull this all off.  Everyone was up around seven and it was still a bit of a challenge to be out the door by ten.

We actually arrived early, a miracle for us.  Brunch was awesome at La Cima as always.  The food was excellent and the selection was really broad.  The crab cakes eggs benedict was a particular favourite.  There were balloon animals and face painting for the kids and little Easter goodie buckets.  It was very nice.  All of the kids seemed to have a good time.

After we ate it was time to go down on to the lawn for an Easter egg hunt.  There was a special area for the two and under crowd.  Liesl and Garrett both did very well running around collecting Easter eggs.  They had practice since they both did it at the house this morning before we left.

We came back home and now we are on the “cruising into the delivery” mode.  That was our final pre-baby activity.  Now it is time to relax and get ready to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning.  I went in to the office and worked all evening trying to get everything possible done and out of the way so that there is nothing hanging over my head tomorrow.  All of my out of offices are set and no one is expecting to hear from me.  My email mailboxes are effectively empty.  The bills have been paid.  We should be in good shape.

Dominica went to bed around nine.  I did closer to eleven.  The iPhone is depleted and plugged in so I should have a full charge for tomorrow.

I spent the morning working, actually there turned out to be quite a bit of work needing my attention, while a ton of baking was going on in the kitchen.  Dominica was forced to spend the morning relaxing on the couch and not moving – which she really needed after all of the exertion the last few days.  It turns out, however, that the girls were planning a secret baby shower (or diaper drop, really) for her and did not want her to know, which is pretty hard to do in her own house.  But they pulled it off.  Francesca and Brittany would sneak into my office to hide cupcakes on the servers.

The party was at noon.  Liesl kind of felt that the party must be for her as all parties at her house are for her.  She had a very good time, though.  She especially enjoyed the blow up bounce house that Debbie brought over.  At one point Liesl made me stay outside with her for about an hour all by myself just so that she could play in it.  She didn’t care if the other kids were there or not.  She had a blast.  Dominica thinks that we might need to get one for her, she liked it that much.

I drove Dominica’s mother and Emily out to the Verizon store this evening as mom’s cell phone is broken (HTC Droid Incredible, it just reboots continuously) and she needed to get it fixed.  It turned out that they could not fix it or do anything to help her even though it was a very well known Android update issue with the Incredible that broke it.  I was eligible for an upgrade and getting her a smartphone, even one she didn’t like, would have been well over three hundred dollars and a good one over four hundred.  So we decided that she would get my BlackBerry Tour temporarily until she was eligible for an upgrade and that I would take the opportunity to go to the iPhone 4 since my eligibility had already come up.

Dominica has been bugging me to get a new phone for a while as the BlackBerry doesn’t do what we need and has been having horrible battery issues which makes it nearly useless for us since I am nearly always without a working phone (BlackBerrys have the major issue that their radios turn off about halfway through their battery life so running them down in order to recharge them means going nearly a day without a phone and then all the time to charge them!)  So this is the perfect time to have a new iPhone.  I need the battery life and battery behaviour for emergencies and coordination with the new baby plus the better camera, ability to reliably Twitter and FourSquare,  and just generally to communicate.

The house was a pretty big disaster post-party and everyone was exhausted.  For dinner we ordered in sandwiches from Joe’s, same as we did late last night.  Everyone really enjoys their Italian subs – very authentic.

We got Liesl’s “television”, the 46″ LCD, hooked up in the living room tonight so that people could watch something.  Francesca went out in to the garage and dug out the Playstation 3 that was lost out there so that we could hook something to the television.  Netflix is not working there, though, as the Platstation Network has been hacked and is no longer working.  It has been down for days.  So everyone watched The Sorceror’s Apprentice on BluRay since it was what we had on hand.

Obviously most of my evening was spent getting the new phone set up and working.  I think that I have just about everything working on it tonight.  I will test it heavily tomorrow at La Cima for brunch and try to run it down throughout the day so that I can have it at 100% when we go to the hospital.