The Road Home...

To get to Santa Monica UCLA Hospital from Manhattan Beach there are three ways you can go.

You can take the 405 North to the 10 East and pray to the traffic gods that they will be kind to you..(sometimes jumping in the carpool lane by yourself, I'll admit it!). If that doesn't work, you can take the surface streets through Westchester, Marina Del Rey, Culver City and Santa Monica and while you don't save a whole lot of time, you will get there in about 40 minutes and you're pretty guaranteed to keep moving... and then sometime times you can take an unexpected route which gets you there 10 minutes quicker for no apparent reason, or you perhaps take a wrong turn down 17th street that is covered in speed bumps which makes for an interesting drive.

Regardless of how you get there the destination is always the same, to get to Sydney's bedside before her "touch time".

The road home is proving a bit more difficult. Sydney is doing well in that she is at a whopping 5 lbs 3ounces (over 2300g) (a weight I couldn't even imagine when I first saw her) however neurologically she cannot seem to pull together the concept of "suck, swallow, breath" which of course is what she needs to do to be able to be fed without a feeding tube. On Friday 11/16/07 we marked 12 weeks since Sydney was born.

We are also hitting the wall in the sense that her progress to get home is stalling. In an effort to be creative, her doctors have decided to put her back on her oxygen with the smallest amount of support and reduce her food intake so that she won't be so full and have such a hard time breathing during and after meals. In addition to all this, Sydney is very anemic which is why her energy level is so low. Over the next five days hopefully these new elements will bring a small amount of progress and then they will make the decision of whether or not to give her another blood transfusion.

To say we are getting tired is a small understatement but when we are with Sydney every driven mile, gallon of gas, ounce of pumped breastmilk, elevator ride, handwash, antibacterial rub, nurse greeting, telephone call and dirty diaper is worth it. She is beyond delicious to us and there is a mischief to her little gassy smile. Her cleverness is yet to be realized.

I took Savannah and Shelby spontaneously to the beach last week. Like waiting for the tide to come in they anxiously await her homecoming and it is what they are asking for for Christmas more than any toy they may want.

We really don't know when Sydney will come home. It could be next week, it could be a month from now. I'm just hoping I can grant these little girls Christmas wish as it is their dad's and mine as well...