September 29, 2008: Day 29 (4 weeks old today, staph outbreak, and very first bath)

You are in for a treat. This is the best (and longest) blog posting ever, stocked with loads of pictures and videos. (thanks again Lee)

To celebrate Aidan's 4-week birthday, he got his very first bath today! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, we had Lee again tonight:



Note that the RT is in a gown. Aidan is now officially in quarantine, where staff must wear gloves to touch him or his equipment, and a gown is to be worn for handling him. 3 babies in our corner of the NICU all tested positive for staph bacteria. They'll probably never know exactly how this happened, or which baby had it first, or if there was more than one independent "ground zero". We've been told that the bacteria in Aidan's eyes and nose *did* respond to normal antibiotics, so he does *not* have MRSA.

Enough about negatives for today, because we did have a very fun visit tonight, one of our most enjoyable yet.

Last night Aidan surprised us all by making it to 3 pounds. I wasn't ready with the camera because we really weren't expecting it. Tonight, Lee and Aidan were kind enough to perform a reenactment of last night's momentous 3-pound weighing, and this time I was ready:



Please ignore that it took 3 tries to get 3 pounds exactly. Aidan kept wanting to weigh 2 lbs 15.9 oz.

Here is the official 3-pound photo:



OK, so Aidan didn't *gain* any weight tonight. But that's OK. Aidan has had several days in a row with big gains, plus he has been looking puffy from water retention. Denyse and I thought he actually looked a little less puffy today, which means he probably lost some of his water weight. (plus, Lee used a different scale tonight, and I don't know exactly how precise these scales are. A couple weeks ago, I asked what the error tolerance on the scales is, 1 gram, 5 grams 10 grams? I didn't get an answer, but I did get a strange look).

Before the bath, they performed Aidan's normal 10pm cares. Denyse cleaned out the infectious goo from Aidan's eyes and massaged his tear ducts:



You can see Aidan's CPAP-head in this video :( The CPAP hat, even though it is not really that tight, is elongating his head:



So I ran a Google search for "meaning of polish name stawicki" and the first item in the list is The Stawicki Surname from ancestry.com! It says the meaning of Stawicki is:

Polish: habitational name for someone from Stawik, the name of settlements in Kielce, Kraków, and Lublin voivodeships and of a place now in Ukraine.

So I guess there are multiple plaves called Stawik. From Wikipedia Stawik (pronounced stavik) is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Jeziorzany, within Lubartów County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland.


Click on picture to see it bigger.

Facinating. This may be where we came from. I never knew this, and we all owe it to Lee for asking us. The website also shows a book for sale on Amazon.com called THE STAWICKI NAME IN HISTORY for $29.95. I'll have to get that!

OK, enough with this digression, back to Aidan.

Here, Aidan is not too all happy after his normal RT care:



Next, Aidan needed his antibiotic eye drops (yes, Denyse is doing the drops):



Then, Aidan needs his CPAP back on. Lee was hoping that Aidan would be stable enough for a full bath, without the CPAP on, but he started de-saturating right at the start of cares, during a diaper change, so he decided that Aidan was not ready for a full, naked bath.



They keep promising us Aidan's cone-head will go away quickly after he is off the CPAP.

When all the normal cares were finally finished, Aidan is ready for his very first bath:





After his bath, Aidan needs to be fully dried so heat doesn't evaporate away with water:



Aidan doesn't know what to make of the whole experience:



After Aidan is clean and dry, he needs to lay under the heat lamp to get his body temperature back up to 36.6 degrees C:





Aidan is wiped out from the whole ordeal...





Tonight was a very fun night with Aidan. One of the few nights where it actually seemed like we had a baby of our own to care for and play with. We look forward to him growing and becoming more stable so we can have nights like this more often.

Is that enough pictures and videos for you, Grandma?