I just got an update and some new pictures from JC!

Eli’s doing great. He’s up to 3 lbs 7 oz and is still eating as much as they will feed him. He definitely knows when meal times are and will let you know if you’re a little late. They took him off of aminophylline, which helped him to regulate his heart rate, on Friday. It takes two days for him to get the aminophylline out of his system and then they start a five day countdown. If he can go five days without a bradycardia (drop in heart rate) then he gets to come home. The doctors and nurses have warned us that it is not uncommon for babies to have these when they come off of the medicine. If he has one it restarts the five day countdown. We’re trying not to get too excited, but this means he could come home as early as Friday. We, of course want him home as soon as possible, but we also want to make sure he’s ready. Lindsay is feeling no ill effects of the blood patch and her headaches are gone. Since they put her on blood pressure medication last week, her BP has dropped. It’s still higher than normal, especially for her, but nowhere close to as high as it was.

In other Zannis news, My parent’s (really my little brother’s) dog Shadow had her puppies during the night Saturday night!! Mom and Nick stayed up until 4:30 am helping her deliver EIGHT puppies. . .they went to bed thinking she was done, but when they woke up and counted, there were NINE!!! I will post pictures as soon as mom emails me some. She said that they were all black (their Lab is black), but some had some white spots around their paws. Still no luck on identifying the Daddy, though. It’s gonna be a hard child support battle to win. :)

This morning when we left to go to church, Chris carried Ali down to the car, and when he was buckling her in, he realized that she had “smuggled” a very small book from upstairs. Odd, but no problem. About halfway to church, she wanted to hand me the book. She didn’t want it anymore. Odd again. But then, we’re almost to church (of course), and she starts groaning, straining, and turning red. Yup, there’s always a poop on the way to church. Immediately after starting the pooping ritual, she says “book! book pleeeese”, and I realize why she brought her book. She is definitely her father’s child.

I picked up Ali this morning from her glorious weekend at Gramamma and Pop’s. She took a loooong nap to recover from all of her fun, and then we went to an afternoon dinner, and then to the park. I got to play with some of the new features on my new camera. So far, it’s really great! Here are some of the better shots I got today:

This was my favorite picture of the day. I usually don’t like out of focus pictures, but this one caught my eye because she is partially in focus and it was striking:
Playing with the sepia setting:
The vivid colors setting:
Just a regular picture:

Swinging is such joy for Ali!!
On these next two sets, I used the continuous shots feature to take multiple shots at a time as she slid down the slide (which she just started liking again, but still a bit reserved – liked to keep a tight grip on Daddy’s hand!!):

Trying out the big girl slide! but still keeping a hold on Daddy:

A few contemplative shots of her playing on the stairs (her favorite part of the playground – she spend 30 minutes or more just going up and down the stairs, saying under her breath, “upstairs, upstairs”):

We had a wonderful afternoon having our baby back – we had missed her a LOT!!!

Can you believe it – I skipped a day of blogging!! Just for you, Gina. ;) You shouldn’t complain so much about my too-often blogging. I can’t help it if I have a very exciting life! Ha! :)

Since Ali plays hard and gets dirty in the country and Mom’s not dressing Ali to impress, I never pack her bows to wear in her hair. However, Ali was “helping” me pack her bags yesterday, and when I finished, I asked her “can you think of anything else that I need to pack?”, and she immediately pointed to her bows and said “bows!!!”. Obviously, I packed her bows after that!! She is such a girl – loves everything “pretty”!!

We always love the opportunity to keep AJ so that she and Ali can play, and so we kept AJ last night while David and Ashley had a work-related dinner. As I have posted many times before (but I have a lot of new readers, so I’ll review), Ali and AJ and bestestest friends! They LOVE hanging out and talk about each other every day. It is so fun to see them relate to each other. Last time AJ came over, we had an absolute ball, and I think I took some of the best pictures I’ve ever taken. Although I didn’t dress them in matching jammies with matching pigtails this time, I did get some cute pictures. This time was more fun in some ways (we were much more comfortable chasing around two toddlers around since we’d done it once before), and less fun in others (Ali had the beginnings of a cold, so she wasn’t her usual excited, energetic self. And yes, I did warn Ashley that Ali was getting a cold!!). But it was a great time, and the girls LOVED playing together!
Here’s the pics:

Waiting for Mr. Chris/Daddy to get home!!
OK – getting bored. Hurry up Daddy!!!
AJ was obsessed with reading books to Elmo. She did it throughout the night. See the stack of world almanacs behind her? Yup, Elmo got the whole download. ;)
For some reason they look shocked that I’m taking their picture. Come on girls, you know that’s my normal mode of operation!!
AJ reading, Ali trying to hide a book in the camera case. Maybe so that AJ has one less to read to Elmo?
I took several pictures of them on this bench, and realized that my child is becoming gargantuanly huge. Especially her head!! She looks like a giant next to AJ! I mean, we all know that AJ will be more petite than Ali since Ashley is more petite than me, but come on, AJ is 3.5 months older! Ali, slow down on the food!!

Dazed and confused. . .AJ didn’t want to leave the bench. Reading to Elmo, again. . .
Still on the bench. . . .
On the bench so long she’s getting sleepy!!
Phew. Finally back to playing.

Uh-Oh. . .found a new chair. . .
Wanting to share!!
mmm. . . maybe not share.
Seriously – I don’t wanna share!!!
AJ sitting like a little lady and Ali. . . not so much.

“Lean on me. . . “
This was hard to come by last night . . . a double smiling picture!!
Such a CUTE, toothy smile!!
Another one. . .But Ali is still in a cold-daze. . .
Ali, being that she had a cold, was of course ready to go to bed. AJ, not so much. She was having way too much fun reading every bit of literature in the house to Elmo. Here’s a video of me asking them if they were ready for bed, and AJ trying to escape the bedtime police!!

All in all, it was a very fun night!! The girls had fun, we had fun, I think I managed to keep them from swapping snot, and of course I had plenty of photo ops! What else could anyone ask for?!?

The blood patch went well. Lindsay’s headaches are gone and her BP is back down to normal. Eli is now in CCN 3 on the seventh floor (a promotion). He’s eating 26 CCs (almost an ounce!) and is out from under the lamp. He looks great, and the doctors said they will probably let him eat as much as he wants very soon!!

I sleptwalked last night. I remember jumping out of bed to “check on Eli”, who was asleep in our hallway. I woke up in the hallway, realizing that Eli was not, after all, there, or needing me to check on him.

I have sleptwalked all my life, more or less – it comes in waves. I always wake up the next morning remembering sleepwalking, whether I actually wake up during the walk or not. I did it quite a bit as a kid, and Mom and Dad were used to it. I would run into the living room where they would still be up and watching TV, and I would panickingly tell them something completely nonsensical. Mom would calmly tell me that I was asleep. I would start to argue, then think about it for a second, and say “oh. You’re right. I am asleep.” Mom would then take my arm and escort me back to bed.

Oddly enough, my sleepwalking quit altogether when Chris and I got married, except for one time when I woke up about to go out the door. That was scary. So other than that one instance, I had a six year break from sleepwalking – which ended very abruptly when Ali was born. Then it started up again with a vengeance. Literally every night for at least the first three weeks after we came home frmo the hospital, I would sleepwalk. I would think she was in the bed with us and wake up frightened (we never co-slept with her) and run to put her back in her crib, only to discover that she was already in her crib. If I didn’t wake up when discovering this, I would always gently set “fake baby” in the crib with “real baby” just to make sure. Another sleepwalk I would have is that I would look up and see Oreo in her cat perch – but in my dream, it was Ali – I would actually “see” Ali in the cat perch and think that Chris had put her there. I would wake him up and ask him why he put Ali in the cat perch. Sometime in the process of waking Chris up (before I actually woke him up if he was lucky), I would wake up and realize that it was actually Oreo, not Ali, in the cat perch.

It was a pretty vivid time of sleepwalking when Ali was born – I will never forget it. It was so wierd how it was EVERY night for so long. However, my most memorable sleepwalking experience happened in a funeral home. How can I shake that memory??

When I was an early teenager, Mom, Mammaw and I went to visit some relatives in Mississippi. They lived in a converted funeral home. It was a long, winding house, where every room would lead to another room, rather than there being a central hallway that led to all the rooms. We got there late, so we didn’t “tour” the house before going to bed. My mom and I were sharing a bedroom, and we were told that we would be sleeping in the former embalming room. Nice. There were two rooms off of the embalming bedroom – another little room (where Mammaw was sleeping), and a bathroom. So I got ready for bed in the bathroom, then headed to bed. Sometime in the night I sleptwalked, totally unconscious of it at the time (usually I have a “reason” for sleepwalking and I at least remember where I go and how I got there, but this time I didn’t remember at all), until I SUDDENLY wake up in the bathroom with no idea how I got there. So I open the door to head back into our bedroom, but it’s a closet!!! I KNEW that was the door that gone into our bedroom earlier that evening. So, slightly panicking, I open another door, and it dead ends into another little room that I’ve never seen before. REALLY panicking now, I open the THIRD door in the bathroom. It opens into another room I had never seen before – a bedroom – in which our hosts are asleep in the bed. I had apparently sleptwalked through the master bedroom, into the master bathroom which was identical to our bathroom, except that the doors went different places. I tip-toed past them, managed to windingly find my way back into the embalming suite, pulled the covers up to my nose, and didn’t move for the rest of the night!!!

After 7 hours at the hospital, they sent JC and Lindsay home just to come back tomorrow to get the blood patch done. :(. Her blood pressure was high, so they gave her medicine for it and sent them home – I am pretty sure that the blood pressure was the reason they couldn’t do it tonight. Hopefully they’ll be able to do it in the morning.

Greta, unlike me, who let my 100th blog pass last week without much fanfare, is holding a contest in honor of her 100th blog – yay Greta! So, to enter her contest, and to (hopefully) entertain you, my readers, here are 20 things I would never do. Actually, that’s a dangerous phrase – no need to jinx myself. Let’s rename this to:

20 things I can’t imagine myself ever doing:

1. Want to be featured on an episode of “Kids By The Dozen” on TLC.

2. Move away from Birmingham (luckily for me, I’m sure this would show up on Chris’ list of 20 things he’d never do also).

3. Get a tattoo. That’s my Dad’s fault. He brainwashed me. But that’s ok. I don’t mind.

4. Live without Excel. Oh, what a difficult life that would be!

5. Enjoy being away from Chris, even for a little while.

6. Not having my one and only illogical fear: roaches. But hey, it’d be great to be cured of this one.

7. Enjoy the days getting shorter in the Fall/Winter. The misery!

8. Not having a cell phone.

9. Not having a cell phone that could access my email anytime, anywhere. It’s amazing the luxuries you get used to and “can’t live without”.

10. Go a month without reconciling my checking account (OK – I admit it – I actually reconcile it weekly when I “do the budget”).

11. Go a month without taking a picture of Ali. However, surely this will happen when she is a teenager. I’m certain she won’t want to pose for pictures like she does now.

12. Not be involved in Ministry of some sort.

13. Love anyone more than Chris (except God, of course).

14. Look at a plate of mashed potatoes and say, “You know, I don’t really care for starches.”

15. WANT to move, ever, ever again.

16. Walk by my computer and hope I don’t have any new email.

17. Not get a huge thrill about getting a good bargain. Or be able to feel good about paying full price.

18. Drink diet drinks or quit absolutely LOVING fountain cokes. MMMMM.

19. Say a word while burping. And, Chris isn’t allowed to either. I put up with a lot when it comes to bodily functions, with good humor even, but don’t say a word while burping. Even if they did do away with my favorite department store and name it a word that sounds like “belch”, you can’t say it during a belch (Chris thought that it should surely be an exception. It’s not).

20. Not absolutely loving it when people tell me that they read (and even enjoy!!) my blog!

What’s one thing you would never do? Or, never imagine yourself doing? Be sure to leave it on Greta’s contest too!!