Sheep Guarding Llama

Last night was much, much better with Dominica and Luciana sleeping out in the living room.  Dominica had a much easier time and I only had to go out and help when she called me (yes, she would call me on the cell phone.)  Getting a halfway decent night’s sleep helped a lot and Dominica is feeling tons better today with having to have gone through a full night of getting up and down from a prone position over and over.

Francesca and the Grice kids were supposed to be coming up from Houston this afternoon to spend the weekend with us but Francesca found out this afternoon that Clara has pneumonia and so they are not able to be around Luciana.  Dominica is really depressed as we have been so busy with the kids and had been planning on having pretty much continuous family help but now have no way for anyone to come see us until dad arrives in two weeks.  This is going to be rough.  Even if Clara gets better right away they won’t be cleared to be around Luciana until after it is too late for next weekend too.  We are starting to worry a little bit about our ability to take care of work and the kids all by ourselves.

For dinner this evening we knew that we needed to use our La Cima meals so when we finally decided what we wanted to do I called down to La Cima to see if it was too late to place an order.  They were completely busy tonight and needed forty-five minutes to even look at the order.  So I just drove down to Las Colinas and went to the club to order and wait there.  I got dinner and drove it back home.  It was around nine when I arrived there so probably ten thirty by the time that I was able to get home and we were able to eat our dinners.

Dominica is still sleeping in the living room tonight with Luciana while Oreo and I sleep in the bedroom.

Last night was a really rough one for Dominica and I.  The entire family attempted to pile in to mommy and daddy’s room with Luciana in a bassinet at the side of the bed and Liesl trying to sleep in the middle.  That did not last long.  We went for about an hour of Luciana not letting us sleep at all before we decided that Liesl just had to go to her own room – she was not able to get to sleep at all and there was so much activity going on that she was quite far from being asleep and just talking and talking.  When I finally carried her over to her own bed and tucked her in she was actually quite happy to be able to go to sleep.  So, in reality, that did not work out so badly.

Overall we got just about no sleep last night. There were stretches where we got an hour or so but that was about it.  It was a long, hard night.  Dominica was in a ton of pain trying to get up from lying down so she thinks that she is going to skip attempting to sleep in a bed after this.  Just not worth it.  Especially right now as Luciana just needs continuous attention during the night.

I “got up” before seven and at eight we were off to the airport with Dominica’s parents.  That was a quick trip.  On the way home I swung into Walgreens and grabbed some Ibuprofen for Dominica’s pain and then hit Jack in the Box to pick up breakfast for the family.  Today I tried getting Jack in the Pack silver dollar pancakes.  The pancakes ended up being a hit and Liesl just loves them.  She even likes to eat them cold and without syrup.  Hard to believe.

My aunt and uncle came over before I made it back and visited for the morning.  For lunch we left Dominica and Luciana to nap, if possible, and we took Liesl and drove down to La Cima for lunch.  They really liked it there.  We were really late so the place was empty in the dinning room.

Once we returned from lunch Dominica and I had to scramble to get the kids ready so that we could take Luciana to her first pediatric appointment up in Frisco.  So Sharon and Leo decided to get on the road as they are headed for Missouri.  Today they get to experience the joy that is driving across Oklahoma.

Luciana’s appointment went okay.  There is definite concern over her level of jaundice so they did a blood test and we will get results of that tonight.  Her weight is down quite significantly too so their is concern that she is not getting enough nourishment so we are going to have to start supplementing with formula and Dominica will have to take measures so that we are able to measure how much food Luciana is intaking.

We came home and I worked for the evening.  Nothing too eventful tonight.  We just stayed home and relaxed with the kids.  Boy is it weird to have “kids” rather than “kid.”  It is no longer Liesl, it is a “they”.  In some ways, having a second child is just as weird as having the first.

The blood test came back and Luciana is not too bad but she is going to need a lot of sunlight and careful monitoring.

Tonight Dominica and Luciana are sleeping in the living room.  Liesl in her own room (from the very beginning) and Oreo and I have the master bedroom to ourselves.  We are hoping that this means that everyone will have a better night.

I got up early this morning and got as much work done as I could before running in to the hospital at nine thirty to help Dominica and Luciana with getting discharged.  Liesl stayed at home with Dominica’s parents.  It would have been horrible if they had not been home as it would have just been way too much work to try to deal with everything while taking care of Liesl too.

I had to stop at CVS on the way and pick up Dominica’s prescription and then, it turned out, I was quite early so I stopped at Einstein Bagel Bros. for a quick breakfast.  The manager recognized me and asked where the family was because he is used to all three of us coming in after Dominica’s OB/GYN appointments for Luciana.  So we had a whole long conversation about kids as he as four boys of his own and it is quite a struggle for him to get time with them too and make it to work every day.

I was early enough still at the hospital that I was able to take all of Dominica’s stuff to the car and get ready for her to get done with her discharge class that she was taking from ten until eleven.  She took Luciana with her to the class so I had little to do once the car was packed except to play Trade Nations on my iPhone.  Boy am I loving having an iPhone.

I spoke to my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo this morning.  They were in Bard, New Mexico when I first spoke to them and they were on their way towards Carrollton.  That is a pretty long drive so they were expecting to arrive sometime late this evening.

It took about forty five minutes from the time that Dominica got done with class until we were released.  But that was not too bad.  Dominica was not moving too quickly anyway.  Her incision is still really hurting her.

It was around twelve thirty when we arrived back at the house.

I spent the afternoon working in the office, for the most part, while Dominica rested in the living room and her parents played with the children.

It was around six this evening when Sharon and Leo arrived at their hotel in Addison, not too far away.  They went to the hotel and then came over to the house an hour or so later to see Luciana.

Not long after Sharon and Leo arrived, Dominica’s parents drove over to Chili’s for dinner while the rest of us hung out at the house.  They brought dinner back with them for everyone else.

It was an early night for everybody, Dominica is exhausted and everyone else is traveling tomorrow.  I have to leave the house at eight tomorrow morning to take Dominica’s parents to the airport so that they can head back home.

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.