Twins II

My youngest daughter was admitted to the hospital last night because two out of three strips on her twice-weekly sonogram indicated restricted blood flow to "Baby B" and because there were indications that a particular vein to the same baby's liver was beginning to close, something that's not supposed to happen until after birth.

The reappearance of the blood flow problem was disappointing, given that the condition had recently improved enough for the weekly sonograms to be reduced from three to two. But it's the emergence of the second condition, the vein closure, which seems to be the more imminent threat to fetal well-being.

Also, following her admission, she began having contractions and dilating. And this evening she was told to skip her dinner, an indication that a decision to perform the planned C-section may be imminent.

Her mom works tonight, in the same hospital, so she was planning to see her for a few minutes before starting her shift. She said that Sarah was tired, feeling a lot of anxiety, and hadn't felt like eating her lunch.

When she called me yesterday, to tell me about her sonogram and planned admission, we talked about what a good thing it was that her two little ones had had the benefit of these extra weeks, since the blood-flow problem had been discovered, to grow and develop.

At that point, "Baby A" was less than 2 lbs. and "Baby B" was barely more than 1 lb. Now, "Baby A" is almost 4 lbs. and "Baby B" is well over 3 lbs.

The hospital where our daughter is being cared for has the regional Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit or NIC-U. Although we take some comfort in its availability, we had hoped that our two little granddaughters would not have to begin their lives there.

Now, our hope is simply that life may be sustained, for our daughter and her two little ones...

LPK
LiveJournal
1.13.2012 (a)

This Isn't Helping

There are two sayings that've come out of helping my grandson with his school work. One of them, it will be obvious, relates to math and the other to his outside reading.

The one for math is a sendup of Tom Hank's surly manager in A League of Their Own. In our version, the surly grandfather, irritated by his grandson's resistance to learning addition and multiplication fact families, makes the grandson recite, "There's no crying in baseball and no guessing in math."

The one for the similarly-resisted outside reading says, "If you've got the time to do it now, now's the time to do it."

And it's that second one that's sort of leaning over my shoulder tonight. Little J and I have been working for weeks on a series of book reports which, I guess, are supposed to elicit a variety of creative responses to his outside reading.

But if the point of this reading program is to get kids to read, these book reports have done just the opposite. They've taken time away from the actual reading and placed a huge disincentive at the end of each completed book.

Now, I can look at each one of them and say, yeah, I see what this one is intended to do in terms of sharing the experience and interesting others in a given book.

But right now, I don't really have the time or resources to promote anyone's interest in reading except my grandson's. And the best way to do that is to just do that.

Read broadly, to find out what he likes, and then read. Read, read, read.

LPK
LiveJournal
1.13.2012 (c)