This 'n That

It certainly has been awhile! Cora is getting to the stage of "Mommy you need to be holding me every minute now, and no thank you, I am not in the mood for a nap this week." I love snuggles with my little pumpkin, but this attitude is not conducive to blog-writing. Luckily for me, she has slept from about 9 pm-5 am the past two nights, so I just wake up with her at five, put her back down around 6, and stay awake! This is perfect for me, since I'm totally a morning person and trying to clean the house after she goes down at 8 or 9 is just not something I'm generally up for.

So here's a recap of what we've been up to the past few weeks:

At the beginning of October we drove to Milwaukee for Little C's appointment with the birthmarks and facial abnormalities specialist. She is fantastic! We felt kind of like VIP because we not only had a referral from Cora's pediatrician and dermatologist, but she had also heard of us through the magic of Cora's aunt being in the pediatric surgery world. Apparently our doctor likes to rub elbows with the hemangioma specialist in Boston and she'd already seen the pictures that we sent my sister. You know how we roll.

I guess I've already given you the basic run-down of the details from that appointment. I just forgot to include the fact that our baby is so adorable that the receptionists at the clinic needed to give her this hat:

So we have a cute little pumpkin head.

A couple of days after, I took her to the local children's hospital and got her hooked up with a Holter monitor so we could start her on the topical medication. With Cora being so little, they were slightly concerned that she may experience some heart rate irregularities with the medicine getting into her system. This is more of a concern if we start the oral medicine (Propranolol) later on, but since she's teeny even for her age and my family has a history of really low blood pressure, they decided we'd better monitor her on this medication just in case. 

So Cora charmed the hospital from the minute we got there (she achieved this by letting out several huge farts in the silent, but crowded, elevator). She flirted with the receptionists and we quickly got her hooked up. Seeing as getting my little girl dressed and undressed is apparently akin to Chinese water torture, she was not happy to be hooked up to the Holter. We drove home while Cora serenaded me with the dulcet tones of her tortured screams. 

Get this ancient iPod off of me!

Thankfully, her results came back normal after 48 hours of monitoring and daily life in the Robbins nest resumed.

We hung out with lots of family! Yia Yia (her choice...we just roll with it...) came to visit and took us out to lunch and the book store for some fun Halloween books.

Cora, can you say "speech pathologist"?

We also went back to the apple orchard for more apples and to buy some pumpkins! Daddy had fun wearing her and climbing all of the hills to get to the orchard with the later blooming apples. I carried the diaper bag and apples. Baby-wearing is less fun when you've already had to do it for 8 months.

Overall, Cora's doing very well. Her nose looks lighter in color to me, but I'm not confident that it's totally stopped growing. She's officially on the growth chart now in all categories (weight, length, and (gigantic) head circumference) and has finally surpassed her birth length! We'll go back to the hemangioma clinic next week to see what they think and take action from there.

But also, guess who can kind of sort of sit up in her bumbo chair for a couple of seconds! With such a little body and giant head, we've had to come up with creative variations on "tummy time" that don't involve her legs flailing around in the air.

No she is not staring at the television...

Seeing her sit up is amazing and we're realizing just how big our little C is getting! Of course we love her very much and would like to encourage her to continue sleeping through the night. (We mean it.)

Speaking of which, I hear some weird cackling noises coming from the bedroom! Guess I'm off to start our day.