First Week of Class

It’s been a week since class began and I had to buy a new planner to keep track of all my classwork and homework. Anatomy and Physiology definitely seems to be a dividing line in terms of coursework. This class has a once a week lecture, where we’re covering about two chapters, and a once a week lab class, where we handle application of those two chapters. I think there a lot of new college students in my lecture class because none of them seems to understand how to take notes. 90% of the class was frantically copying down notes–even though the notes are available on the school website and we were looking right at them.

So far, we’ve covered the body plan, general explanations of what A&P is, and a review of chemistry. This week, we cover the cell, and this weekend is a holiday because of Labor Day so I don’t have my Saturday lab. Yay! I’ll spend the time studying instead. 🙂

The Next Goalpost of Milestones

Since Little Miss Minion starts pre-k in a few weeks, I figured I would go through the CDC milestones for 5 year olds and see how she’s doing. I posted a while back for the 4 year old milestones and she’s met all but one (catching a ball), so I wanted to see her progress toward meeting the next set. The following list is from the CDC’s website with my own notes after each entry.

Social and Emotional

1. Wants to please friends-yes. She’s fairly good at sharing with others and plays with other kids at school.
2. Wants to be like friends-yes. She likes to note similarities between herself and others, like hair color, shirt color, likes and dislikes.
3. More likely to agree with rules-yes. Mostly.
4. Likes to sing, dance, and act-yes. She constantly sings in the car and always gets up to dance whenever there is music. She is starting to frequently make up little storylines when playing with Mr Minion or myself, like “I’m eating soup (out of my pretend ice cream cup) because its cold outside. Brrr.”
5. Is aware of gender-yes. She mixes them up sometimes (mostly for indeterminate things like a stuffed animal or cartoon character).
6. Can tell what is real and what is make-believe-mostly.
7. Shows more independence, such as visiting a next door neighbor by themselves-have not tried this, as I do not trust her to be outside near the road we live on by herself. She will happily go and talk to neighbors if they are outside.
8. Is sometimes demanding and sometimes very cooperative-100% yes.

Language and Communication

1. Speaks very clearly-I don’t generally have trouble understanding her, but I think other people sometimes do.
2. Tells a simple story with full sentences-yes, I’ve been happy to see that she almost always speaks in full sentences (it’s the English teacher in me).
3. Uses future tense-yes. She likes to explain what we are about to do. “We are going to have dinner and after that, we can watch a movie.”
4. Says name and address-she knows her first and last name, but only remembers her middle name about half the time. We don’t really use it, so I am not surprised. We never say our address either, so I guess we need to work on this one too.

Cognitive

1. Counts 10 or more things-yes.
2. Can draw a person with at least six body parts-not frequently. She usually gets a head, eyes, mouth, and body, but sometimes adds feet, hands, shoes, fingers, etc.
3. Can print some letters or numbers-she can reliably trace all her letters, but can legibly write several on her own. She can recognize all the numbers and letters. This is one that will we will be working with her on this year.
4. Copies a triangle and other geometric shapes-yes-when she feels like it. This will also be something that we work on this year.
5. Knows about things used every day, like money and food-yes. She got really excited the other day because I had some change in the cupholder of my car. “You have MONEY, Mama!!”

Movement and Physical Development

1. Stands on one foot for 10 seconds or longer-no
2. Hops, may be able to skip-can definitely hop. I don’t think I have ever seen her skip
3. Can do a somersault-she is close—I’m worried about the rolling part putting pressure on her shunt and causing pain.
4. Uses a fork and spoon and sometimes a table knife-yes, she has started requesting a knife to cut her own food.
5. Can use the toilet on her own-yes.
6. Swings and climbs-yes!

All in all, I think we are in pretty good shape to start pre-k!

Little Miss Minion’s Due Date

Today was Little Miss Minion’s due date, back in 2015. We stopped using this date to adjust for her prematurity once she turned three, but I still have a wistful feeling whenever this date rolls around. What would she be like if she wasn’t born so early? Would she still have gotten sick in the NICU? Would a slightly more advanced immune system have fought off the infection and kept her from developing hydrocephalus? Would she have a little brother or sister by now, if my pregnancy with her hadn’t been so complicated?

May 14 is Little Miss Minion’s day. It is the day we celebrate her birth, however early and terrifying it may have been. August 3 is another happy day—her Gotcha Day—the day we brought her home.

August 6 is my personal day of remembrance and mourning. Of mourning the loss of what my pregnancy was “supposed” to be. Of scrapping Birth Plans A-Z in favor of Birth Plan-Nobody Dies. Of spending my first nights as a mother in a hospital room, dazed from the magnesium that was keeping me from having strokes and/or seizures, with my baby on a different floor of the hospital. I mourn the day I was discharged from the hospital without my baby, who was too small to come home yet. I mourn the nights I spent that summer when she was in the NICU, pumping every three hours and falling asleep with the machine on as I watched episodes of Good Eats to try to stay awake.

But I remember, too. I remember how tightly those unbelievably tiny fingers and hands gripped my thumb. She would wrap her entire arm around my thumb and just grip it when I would kangaroo her (kangarooing is skin-to-skin contact between parent and child). I remember how she was forever pulling her nasal cannula out of her nose and the two tubes would come down by her mouth and make her look like a tiny vampire. I remember how hard she fought the infection, sepsis, and meningitis. I remember standing by her crib all night after she came out of surgery for her first shunt placement, determined that if she woke up from the anesthesia that night, she wouldn’t feel alone. I remember the feeling of elation as we brought her home. I remember being so proud of how hard she worked in physical therapy and speech therapy.

 

And I remember how, when I put her to bed, she grabs me for a huge hug and says “I love you, Mama.”

 

Quoth Little Miss Minion

Much like Edgar Allan Poe’s famous raven (quoth the raven: nevermore), Little Miss Minion has some phrases that are all her own. Please find a list here for your entertainment.

I’m a octopus officer. (She wanted to be a cop for like five minutes tonight)

Green beans go! (Green traffic light means go)

It was an assigent. (Accident)

Are you going to the hopsickle? (Hospital, where I volunteer in the NICU)

Is that your torn snickel? (Turn signal)

Are you frussrated? (Frustrated)

Are we waiting for the children? (Not really sure what this means, but she’s always waiting for the children or going to play with the children)

Squints at me while attempting to do the “I’m watching you” hand movement of two fingers pointed at your own eyes and then one finger at the other person. She can’t figure out how to do the two fingers by themselves, so she ends up kind of waving at her own face and then pointing at me, while squinting. It’s much less dramatic, but way cuter.

While listening to Siri beatbox yesterday: Mama, can I have catzenbooten again? She’s terrified of Siri but she wanted me to make her beatbox and sing part of bohemian rhapsody.

This is a fun age.

Little Miss Minion’s 4th Gotcha Day

4 years ago today, Mr Minion and I watched as the wires and stickers that had monitored our baby’s heart rate, oxygen levels, and respirations for the past three months were removed. We could see her whole face clearly, without the tube that had gone up her nose and into her stomach. We could pick her up and walk more than a few feet from her crib, something that would have been impossible due to the wires that monitored her vital signs. I vividly remember holding her carefully in my arms and slowly spinning in a circle near the large window in her room in the NICU that we had called home since May.  

As we waited for the discharge paperwork to be signed off on and for our nurses to go over instructions with us, I kept expecting the next person to come into the room to tell that there had been a mistake. That we couldn’t take our daughter home yet. We packed up her tiny preemie outfits, the mobile we had brought her to put on her hospital-issued crib, and her bottles. We also packed the jars of protein powder that we would have to supplement her bottles with for the next several months, and the diapers that were only slightly smaller than my cell phone. We packed her special issue Ultra Preemie bottle nipples, since she was still unable to handle the regular Preemie ones that were available in some stores.  

When our nurse finally came in and asked us if we were ready to head out, I could feel my eyes burning with terrified, excited, nervous, and overjoyed tears. We had arranged Little Miss Minion in her car seat and strapped her in, using rolled up towels, blankets, and washcloths to make sure she was secure. I carried her through the door of her room in the NICU and we walked through the unit, with Mr Minion and our nurse helping to carry the rest of her stuff. As we waited for the elevator to arrive, I waited for someone to run through the double doors with the news that we had to stay. The elevator arrived and the doors remained closed. We walked through the lobby of the hospital, seeing other parents leaving with their two day old full term babies as we left with our 3 month old, 5 pound miracle, who had already survived a Group B strep infection, meningitis, sepsis, and one surgery to implant a shunt to control the hydrocephalus she had developed as a result of those illnesses.  

When we made it to the front of the lobby, I tilted my head to look away from the Maternity Welcome Center, something I still do each time I visit the hospital for my volunteer work. We turned to walk through the vestibule that led to the parking garage and my daughter felt fresh air on her face for the first time since she had been born. We packed her things in the trunk and snapped her carseat into the back of our car. I rode in the back with her, and we stopped to get McDonald’s on the way home for lunch. The packaging was Minion-themed, and I still have a picture of it somewhere.  

While the memories of her birth and the immediate time before and after are fuzzy, thanks to the magnesium I was receiving by IV to prevent seizures or strokes, her Gotcha Day is carved into my memories with a chisel and I will remember every tiny detail of that day for the rest of my life. I will also remember how, when we took her for her first pediatrician visit a few days later, I got a compliment from a woman in the lobby who saw my ridiculously tiny baby and assumed she was a newborn, and said that I looked amazing and she couldn’t believe I had just had a baby. Since Little Miss Minion was three months early, I hadn’t really ever definitely looked pregnant, so after she was born, I looked mostly the same, except less puffy and swollen from the preeclampsia. I had only gained about 15 pounds, and between the stress of the NICU and exclusively pumping, I had lost about half of that. I just said thank you, laughed a little, and darted into the well-baby room to escape from the germ-filled waiting room. 

When I look back on where we started, I am amazed all over again at the tenacity of a 1 pound 14 ounce baby, born 3 months too soon, and the marvels of modern medicine that allowed us to bring her home. It solidifies my yearning to return to the NICU as a nurse, and makes me treasure my time spent there as a volunteer, speaking with parents who have found themselves in the NICU.  

Happy 4^th Gotcha Day, Little Miss Minion. I’m so proud of you and everything you have overcome.