Bein' a Mom

Sometimes Evan doesn't seem like a human being. He's just an eat, poop, and sleep machine that I try to keep oiled and running smoothly. If it works well then I've succeeded. Then sometimes when I look at Evan the moment transcends what is actually happening and I feel like I can glimpse his soul and his emerging personality, and boy is my son hilarious! He makes the funniest expressions and my mind imagines what he would be saying and I just start laughing.

Tomorrow we're supposed to get a call telling us whether we can take off Evan's oxygen or not. Don't tell the doctors, but we already took it off almost a week ago. There's a lot of baby things that probably would have seemed inconvenient or hard had we not experienced them with oxygen on top of it. For example, carrying a car seat is hard. Carrying a car seat and an oxygen tank is even harder. So now that we only have to carry the car seat we love it!! It's so simple! Another example: Dressing a newborn is hard. Dressing a newborn from the bottom-up to avoid the oxygen tubes around his head is even harder. I thought pulling his clothes over his head would be a nice change, but his 99th percentile head is actually not that easy to pull clothes over, so I'm sticking with the bottom-up method for now.

Speaking of his big head (no offense, Evan), tomorrow we're going to get another head ultrasound to see if Evan's ventricles are getting too large for him to handle. If they start affecting his behavior then we'll look into getting a shunt in his brain. We were initially scared about getting a shunt, but now we realize that it's scarier if he needs a shunt and doesn't get one. We've noticed a few of the signs for needing a shunt including increased fussiness, changes in his sleeping pattern, sunsetting eyes (I'll try to get a picture of this), and increasing head size. Most of these signs can be explained away by other things and could just be "normal baby things," but since we've seen multiple signs we're a little concerned which is why we're having the ultrasound done. We just want Evan to be the baby he's meant to be.