Normal things

Wow, time has really been flying by! Magnus's first cardiac catheterization is coming up this Tuesday, and his Glenn is scheduled for just a few weeks after that. We got the call today that he is scheduled to be the "first case" in the cath lab that day, which is great because it means that if everything goes smoothly, he won't have to stay overnight in the hospital (patients have to be observed for 4 hours after the procedure).

Magnus continues to do extremely well with everything except eating and gaining weight, and even that seems to be going OK again in the last week or two. But in the moments we aren't trying to coax a bottle into his mouth, we are really just enjoying him and marveling at his progress.

Last Monday, Iggy and I took Magnus to a "Child Observation" class at a local community college that our neighbor had recommended to us. While technically it is a free, not-for-credit class, in practice it's really more of a parents' group. At the beginning of the meeting, we went around the circle and introduced ourselves and were asked to say something about "what's going on" with our babies. I always feel a little weird being around "normal" parents in these situations. I wanted to be honest about our situation, but didn't want to monopolize the discussion or make the other parents feel bad for worrying about their own relatively lesser problems. As it turned out, though, it seemed like the most stressed-out parent in the group was not either of us, but rather the woman who brought her 6-month-old twins.

It was pretty interesting to see how Magnus compared with the other babies. He was the second-youngest baby there, but was by far the smallest, even smaller than the 6-week-old girl sitting next to us (he was 10 weeks old at the time). But developmentally, he seemed to be on a par with the 3-month-olds, which was very reassuring to me given all that he's been through. He's really strong and good at holding his head up, and is really starting to get the hang of moving his body around in a purposeful way. In fact, a couple of days ago, I was doing "tummy time" with him, and he actually managed to "crawl" using just his legs to drag his head and torso forward across the blanket! I'm sure real crawling is still a long ways off, but the will is clearly there.

Anyway, while I was reassured to see that his development was on track, Iggy was reassured about something else: after we left, he said "I was relieved to see that a lot of the other babies had even weirder hair than he does." Magnus's hair, for the record, is perfectly fine...he just happens to have more of it on the left side of his head than on the right, and not much at all on the top of his head. But there you go. His development seems to be going fine, hair included!