What the Henkel, Padawan?

For as long as I can remember, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to be one of those mothers who runs into the emergency room every time my baby coughed or got a slight rash. So, when we saw that Adrienne had some puffiness around her eye, we decided not to panic. We kept speculating about what it might be - a blocked tear duct? a fingernail scratch? a bop on the eye with her tiny fist?

When it didn’t go away after a few days we started to wonder if it was an infection. We decided we would wait and talk to the pediatrician at our first appointment that was happening in a few days. We were relieved to hear that she thought the same things that we did, but she decided to send us to the hospital just to make sure.

The first hospital said that they didn’t have an eye specialist, so they sent us to a special eye hospital (I didn’t even know those existed!) in the city. There, we were told that they weren’t equipped to handle such a tiny patient, so we were told to go to the children’s hospital the following day. We finally got in to get a head scan. It showed that there is a mass of something behind her eye that is pushing it forward. It doesn’t sound as scary as it looks. In the x-ray, she looks like Quasimodo! Does this look like Quasimodo to you?!?

The doctors from both the eye hospital (is there a special word for those?) and the children’s hospital will be working together on our case. That makes me feel better, but it also makes for a lot of waiting time. We were finally called back in for today but were bumped at the last minute on account of emergency case that came in while we were being prepped. She even had a local anaesthetic cream already applied to her skin to help them insert the IV. I hate waiting, but it’s good to know that this isn’t a crisis and isn’t seen as something that can’t wait.

We will try again on Friday. In the meantime, we have an appointment with the eye specialist tomorrow morning. I hope he has some good news for us.

From now on, I think I’ll be one of those mothers who runs to the emergency room for every little sneeze, just to be on the safe side. Stay tuned for more of Adrienne’s eye adventures…

I can believe that Adrienne is 8 weeks old, but when I think that she is 2 months old - it just doesn’t sound right! I think it has to do with the fact that I compare her to all the milestones in the baby books/websites with her “corrected” age. If we treat her as if she was really born at the end of June, then she should technically be only 1 month old. Really, she’s 2 months old.

She’s been developing dramatically over the last couple of weeks. She is having more and more awake time, as well as more and more fussy periods. One of the things that she’s done that is completely amazing is how any time that I’ve laid her down for a nap with me (on my pillow), she falls asleep right away or stays there calmly looking around the room. Of course, I’ve only tried that when all else has failed. I never believe that it’s going to work, but it does! I really don’t want to wear that one out since it’s a wonderful way to get her to sleep and I will need it when I’m taking care of her all on my own.

We’ve just started taking Adrienne out to social gatherings and she has done well so far. We have joined some new mommies from Stockholm group for fika, had lunch with the girls and for supper over at Heather and Måns’s. During all of these visits, she’s slept through most of the time - so I hope that keeps happening. When my father was here, she was a wonderful sightseeing tourist . She’s such a natural!

Just look at the fun we can have while she is sleeping

She’s also becoming more interactive with us. Here she is having a conversation with her grandmother. I’m not sure who was doing most of the talking at the time, but they both seem quite involved.