Learning to Play

Whenever I find myself thinking that Hannah is surely the cutest and smartest baby ever to grace the face of the planet, the objective Karl tells me that every parent thinks the exact same thing, and we're all absolutely correct. Carla and I were just a little bit late joining the least exclusive club every formed, and now that we're members, we feel a bit silly that we just didn't get what all the fuss was about. Now, I find myself wanting to ask perfect strangers, "Do you have kids? So do I! What do yours look like? Here's some pictures of mine! . . . No! Come back! That was just the first 100!"

Hannah spent about 4 hours off the oxygen entirely yesterday. I was changing out her nasal cannula and noticed that her pulse oximeter readings were just fine without it. So I set the oximeter on a tighter setting (so it would tell me sooner if she needed to get back on the cannula) and went about my chores while she played with her toy bar and for a while on her play mat. Four hours later, her oxygenation levels were still perfectly normal. I count her breathing rate occasionally, on and off the oxygen, to make sure she isn't just having to breath faster, since that burns up calories that otherwise would go toward growth.

Her readings only started to dip when she fell asleep, perhaps because she's not as consciously regulating her breathing. So we put the cannula back on, set at the lowest setting. We would probably leave the cannula off more often, but alternating between it off and on means that the tape has to be taken off and put back on, and we don't want to irritate her skin by constantly putting tape on it and pulling it off a few hours later.

Anyway . . . she has started to use her hands more when playing. She seems to have learned how to make the toy bar light up and play music by batting at the toys, and one of her other crib toys has some dangling rattles that she bats at more often that would seem statistically likely if it were random flailing.

She's pretty much sleeping through the night, except for when I tell anyone that she's sleeping through the night, after which she dances the ga-ga cha-cha until the wee hours, just to remind us who's boss. So, since my blog logs show that there are about 15 unique visitors each day, that means she'll keep us up late for the next two weeks. If you don't see an update for a while, you'll know why.

I don't really have any new photos, but here are a couple of videos. For a relatively small clip of Hannah Smiling (1.6MB), click here. For a longer video of Hannah jamming with a singing lion, checkout this clip on youtube.