Happy Halloween

I'm not one to dress up, so to celebrate Halloween Fletcher decided to ditch mom and dad and join up with a Pirate Family (also known as my sister Angie, her husband Greg and Fletcher's cousins Trey and Michael).

Fletcher's First FIRE!

So, I am just plugging away at work when I get an email from my husband, who is at home with the baby. The subject line reads "This is what Fletch and I are doing!!!". Okay, fair enough. Trevor never emails me, but he has been on vacation for the past few weeks and has spent most the time at home alone with the baby while I am at work, so he is probably looking for something creative to do and thought he would share.

I open the email and the body reads "Fletcher's First FIRE!" and I notice there are a couple pictures attached to the email. For a split second I panic, thinking that there would be pictures of our charred house, or at very least the kitchen, when I opened the links.

Instead, this is what I saw...

I will never understand men. I guarantee that Trevor was more excited about this than he was about Fletcher getting his first tooth earlier this month (the glare is bad in this picture but I swear, there is one (actually, even two) popping out of his lower gums, and we've endured the fussing to prove it!).

Time to Make the Doughnuts

I returned to work on August 1st. The last time I had been at the office to work was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I remember stopping by my secretary's office and mentioning that I was going to swing by my OB's office on the way home for a "peace-of-mind" check-up because I just felt a little off. That was over eight months ago and now, after a week and a half on the job, it almost feels like I never left.

So far, returning to work has been a relatively low-stress transition. I am working four days a week and out of those four days Trevor will be home with Fletcher three days and my mom will watch him one day a week. Of course I miss Fletcher like crazy when I am gone, but I think it is good that he is getting so much one-on-one time with his dad.

I even got to show Fletcher off to my work colleagues my first day back as the firm just happened to be having an ice cream social that afternoon and Trevor brought Fletcher up to meet everyone.

Here is a picture we took when I got home from work. Think I was happy to see my little guy?

When eBay Goes Wrong

Just look at that face. It is like he is thinking "Mom, what in the world am I wearing?". You see, one of his nicknames is Fletcher Flycatcher (when my sister was babysitting me in my mag-induced haze for a couple of days after his birth she got really bored so starting typing in random questions to the Yahoo questions site, including what middle name goes with Fletcher... "Flycatcher" was our favorite response).

So naturally I have to indulge in the occasional frog-themed outfit, toy or nursery accessory (but I am doing my best not to go overboard). Well, I have a couple of burp clothes in this cute frog print (it is in the rim of the hat he is wearing) and when my sister saw this outfit on eBay she told me about it and I entered a bid out of curiosity to kind of fish for the price. Obviously, and quite inadvertently, I won the auction. It is really even more over the top, considering there are matching shorts that he is not even wearing plus the hat actually has two knotted corners that stick up, but have fallen back in this picture.

I usually subscribe to the less is more philosophy in dressing Fletcher, but I do have to admit that I think the fly on the shoulder of the onesie is kind of cute.

Losing Oxygen

Finally, losing oxygen is a good thing. Our medical supply company called today and said they would be by to pick up our oxygen tanks. Fletcher has been completely off supplemental oxygen since July 11th, and was only on it at night since May 30th, but we still had the tanks at our house just in case. Of course wearing the cannula didn't always mean he was actually getting supplemental oxygen. The top photo was taken on March 4th and the second is from May 26th. I love to compare the size of the adhesive patches relative to his cheeks. It really illustrates his amazing growth.

We have a two-story house and Fletcher's nursery is upstairs, so we had the big tank next to the stairs and 50 feet of tubing for the nasal cannula, so we could have him upstairs or down without having to move the tank. After nearly five months, that tank had become a fixture in our house. The entryway looks naked without it there.

I did manage to talk the delivery guy into letting me keep one portable canister at the house in case of an emergency. I highly doubt (and definitely hope) that we'll ever need it, but it is a nice little security blanket for me (of course this is coming from a mom who insisted that her boy stay on supplemental O2 during the day for a month after the NICU said his saturations were adequate... "adequate" just didn't sound like a word I wanted to use when describing Fletcher's oxygenation after all he'd been through).

We also had our last home health nurse visit today (another measure ordered solely for the benefit of pushy, insecure mom). Fletcher has been growing well, weighs 14 lbs 8 oz, his oxygen saturation was 97, and his lungs sound good. Can't ask for more than that.

Formal Introduction and Blog Resurrection

I had the best intentions of turning this blog into a chronicle of Fletcher's stay in the NICU, both to update friends and family and to have a personal record of our hospital stay. Well, life got in the way.

As evidenced in his birth announcement, Fletcher has been home for four and a half months-- a whole month and a half longer than he was in the hospital. I haven't taken up this blog again (as if one entry really counts as starting a blog) because I felt like I needed to go back and record his life from the beginning in chronological order and as each day passed the prospect got more and more overwhelming.

So, I have decided to jump back in and start with the present, adding recaps of Fletcher's NICU experience and first few months along the way... when I get around to it, that is.

Super-Long NICU Summary

Some day I hope to post a fairly comprehensive NICU summary here in order to have a record. After just over one year it is amazing everything I am forgetting already.