When Mommy and Daddy say no, ask Nana

Wanted to post this really cute picture of Scarlet and Nana that was taken a few weeks ago. It was taken in her room as Nana seems to really like that chair as its great for rocking babies to sleep.

We are planning to have people over for the 4th, so I called mom (Nana) to see if she would be interested in coming to Dallas for the weekend to watch Scarlet so that Ron and I could work in the yard. You think she could say no? She will be here Saturday afternoon....... :)

Love ya mom!

Colic, or just grumpy???

Well it has been a week and it seems the natives are getting restless for Scarlet updates. So Daddy thought he'd post something tonight to present a small "offering" to Scarlet's adoring fans. ;-p

For the last week our little "angel" has been turning into quite a little grump starting at about 5pm and lasting until 10pm - midnight. She'll be just right as rain in the mornings and early afternoon. But then as afternoon turns into evening, she'll turn up the cranky meter from just a little dissatisfied to full on ticked-off by dark. (See her throwing a fit at Daddy above?)

At first we though she was going through a colic phase and although that may be the case to some degree, we now think that she really was just experiencing gas pains.

What led us to believe that this was what it was? A friend of ours lent us her copy of her Dunstan Baby Language DVD's (Thank You Stacy) and we finally go around to watching them one evening last week. Darn if that stuff REALLY WORKS! Babies do communicate using these basic words.

"Every newborn communicates from birth to 3 months using 5 distinct sounds, or “words” to express their physical needs. This is regardless of the language their parents speak and is part of nature’s plan – that your baby can tell you what they need from the very beginning."

Anyway after watching it we saw that Scarlet was making the "Eh" sound a lot and that is the word/sound for upper wind/gas. So we started burping her even more than we were doing (even trying many of the suggestions demonstrated on the DVDs). And what do you know, Scarlet began to be less cranky and go back down to sleep in the evenings a lot more consistently.

So there you have Scarlet's first product endorsement - something that actually works and is well worth the cost several times over!

Scarlet says: "Burrrrrp, Oh I feel better now Daddy."

Oh and stay tuned for lots more photos of Scarlet's BIG weekend. She just got back from a trip to Oklahoma for the annual "Craig Family Reunion" and a visit to Nana's, Granpa's and some other surprise guests!

Momma's 1st post...... "The birthmark"

Its time someone other than "Daddy" put their thoughts on this blog! Weird how Dad seems to have a lot more time for this kind of stuff lately...

First off, we love reading the comments that people are leaving so please continue to post them as they are definitely being read. We also appreciate all the wonderful wishes, cards and gifts that everyone has sent over the last few weeks. If Scarlet isn't spoiled enough from her parents, shes getting it from all the wonderful friends and family that we are surrounded by. "Thank you" just doesn't seem to say enough! (Thanks to Aunt Kathy M today as we received your package. LOVE the bunny!)

Secondly, I thought I might mention Scarlets birthmark that mysteriously appeared several days after we brought her home. According to her pediatrician, it is a "Strawberry Hemangioma." Basically it's just a birthmark that can grow in size for a few months and then it goes away during the child's first few years.

Now you may not have noticed it in a lot of the pictures as it developed after they were taken, AND daddy likes to "Photoshop" it out when posting pictures. Ive mentioned on a couple of occasions that we probably shouldn't do that as it doesn't portray what she really looks like. (For the record, I HATE the birthmark and have been obsessing about it for a week now) When I went online to look up information about it, I realized how much worst this could be. That and everything points to the fact that it should go away! Sooo... wanted to let you know that from time to time daddy might miss a picture and you will see it, but for now, we will continue to remove it and you will never know the difference!

Daddy Ron's first Father's Day.

Father's day has been one of those holidays that has been off of my personal radar screen for a very long time. The last Father's Day that I had a direct connection to was probably Father's Day 1980 since my father died of a heart attack just before the next one in late May of 1981. Now I couldn't ask for a better "father-in-law" with my wife's Dad - Steve - and we've done some Father's Day things with him over the years. But I'm talking about a direct, "this is MY Dad" type of link.

So now twenty seven years later here on June 17th, 2007, Father's Day once again has that direct kind of meaning for me. I myself am now an official "FATHER". Or at least I'm guessing it is "official" as I have yet to receive any kind of membership papers or requests for club dues.

What does one do on his very first "Father's Day"? Well sleeping a little later was my first treat. Mom was very kind in that regard. Ginger got up early and took care of the early shift with Miss Scarlet - although I did find myself waking up to her cries from the bedside bassinet - until Mom re-appeared from "pumping" duty in the living room and whisked her away with her. There was no breakfast in bed however. In fact there was no breakfast at all (at least not for Daddy - Miss Scarlet got two breakfasts at least!). And not until G mentioned that she hadn't heard from her Dad this weekend and me mentioning that he was probably waiting for his "Father's Day call" from her, did she even remember that Father's Day was here - TODAY. But I'll cut Mommy some slack on that with Miss Scarlet's level of grumpiness this weekend and her forcing us off her normal feeding times over the last two days. And OF COURSE she picks the 1AM - 5AM time frame to be at her MOST grumpy!

The day went along nicely with cards from both Ginger AND little Miss Scarlet! Who knew that Scarlet had picked me out a card - much less that she could sign her name to one! Me thinks that Mommy MAY have helped her with that (even though she denies it).

Later in the day we all went out for a little outing to Costco and everyone's very favorite place to go - Wal-Mart (what a beating that place can be)! Then it was back home for a nice family meal and a little TV before both Mommy and Scarlet fell asleep together on the couch. Something almost exact in appearance to this "Awwww, how cute" photo of them:

All in all it was a very nice day - simple and sweet with Daddy's two favorite girls!

Next year though, I'm going to put in my breakfast order - EARLY! ;)

Signed, - The Newest Dad on the Block!

The cutest, most beautiful baby girl EVER!

I think every expectant parent hopes that their baby is born healthy, normal, and has some semblance of decent looks. But we just don't know how our genetic jumbalaya is going to come out. Sure Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can produce a super good-looking perfect baby, but what about the rest of us mere mortals? Would our little miracle (and that's what they are) come out with the best traits Mommy & Daddy have to offer - or the worst? Would our baby end up being one whose looks are only truly appreciated by their own parents - a face only their parent could love?

Well with little Miss Scarlet we are truly blessed. First and foremost both Mommy & baby survived their traumatic birth ordeal (see first post at the bottom for details) and both have progressed to what appears to be the fast-track to perfectly normal health. However we have ALSO been blessed with the gift of a perfect little girl that is SO VERY BEAUTIFUL & ADORABLE!

Take a look at the pictures included here and I'm sure you'll instantly recognize that she is one gorgeous little girl! And there can be no disagreements to this because her proud Daddy has officially proclaimed her to be - "The Cutest Baby EVER"!!!

What is up with all the dots???

All the colored dots that I put in the banner bar for little Miss Scarlet's blog page are the same basic colors of round dots that we used in her nursery.

Ginger & her best friend Amy (Aunt Amy below) found some brown fabric with a pattern of colored circles/dots in a store in St. Louis. This fabric along with a matching one of similar colored long rectangles was to be for the crib bumper pads and crib skirt.

It was from this same dot pattern, that we based the design of the entire nursery on. And let me tell you, that little undertaking is quite a story into itself! Perhaps in a future blog post we'll show the "construction photos" and go into the long, over-the-top account of not only painting the room walls, but also painting 50,000 wooden circles of varying sizes BY HAND - and then attaching them to the walls. Of course to be fair, NO Shockley home improvement project is EVER easy or short (for those in the know - recall the "Waterfall" spectacle).

Long story short, the nursery turned out great. Or as G & Aunt Amy would say - "SUPER CUTE"! (Which Daddy is proud to say is fitting of our super cute little girl.) Even our next door neighbor's 8 year old daughter verified it as so and asked her mom if they could re-do her room the same way!

Here's the end result of Miss Scarlet's room:

What's in a name.

OUR LITTLE BUNDLE OF JOY!

When you're having a baby everyone always is curious about what you will name your child. Ginger and I had no problem coming up with boy names while having some difficulty with girl names. And at first it seemed like we had an easy solution to that since our week 12 Level II ultrasound showed that the "genital tubercle angle" was pointing (literally) towards us having a boy. But we discovered at our week 20 standard ultrasound the we were in fact having a little girl. So it was back to the drawing board to come up with girl names.

Her middle name was settled right from the start. My mother's name was Ann and Ginger's mother's middle name is Ann. So our little girl would have Ann as her middle name. But coming up with her first name would prove to be quite an ordeal.

A few names we liked were either too trendy or currently over-used (e.g. Sydney, Sophie). Many others were already in use by friends and family since Ginger and I are nearly the last couple (in our age-range) to finally reproduce.

Then there were names that one of us loved and the other hated. I loved "Ripley" from Sigourney Weaver's heroic character in the Alien movies, but Ginger shot that down because she thought we'd be looked at as "sci-fi geeks" (doesn't she know that she did in fact marry one?). One of Ginger's favorites was the name "Ruby", but for some reason I couldn't get past the fact that it reminded me of the little girl on the Cosby Show (yes I know that her character's name was really "Rudy").

There were other cute names like "Sadie" & "Lola" that were ruined for me by well-known classics by The Beatles and The Kinks. Just couldn't have my daughter's name tainted by songs about harlots & transvestites.

Through all the possibilities, in the end we had two names we both really liked. One was a name that came to mind near the beginning of our search based upon Natalie Portman's character's name in "The Professional" - Matilda. It was a name I had always liked and it was also the same name that Ginger's mother suggested on her own a few months later as a name she liked. The other name was (of course) Scarlet. The two "T" version (Scarlett) is best known as being used by the main character from "Gone With the Wind" - Scarlett O'Hara and the modern day actress - Scarlett Johansson. But Ginger and I liked the single "T" version since it was different and it also is the name of a song that Ginger heard when she first thought that Scarlet would be a good name. On her way to work one morning on her XM Satellite radio she heard the little-known 1981 U2 song entitled "Scarlet". It is a lovely mostly instrumental song from the October album that occasionally chants one lyric over and over - "Rejoice". And for all the trouble we went through to get her here and the miracle that she was from conception AND her scary birth - we indeed have much to rejoice about! Plus for anyone that knows me and the fact that I've been a HUGE U2 fan for 25 years - that really seems like a perfect tie-in.

However right up until her birth Ginger and I still really liked both names a lot. And since we leaned towards one or the other from week to week, we decided to wait until she was born to see if she was more of a Scarlet or a Matilda.

On the day of her birth as Ginger and I were in the labor & delivery room waiting for the induction to take (before all the trauma occurred), both of us discussed that we were leaning towards Scarlet. Then when the bottom dropped out of everything shortly after 5:30pm and I was in the Operating Room watching our wonderful Neonatologist Dr. Walden and her team get our little girl to start breathing, the nurses asked what would be her name. Another L&D nurse mentioned that we had two names and we wanted to see her first. When asked what the two names were I mentioned both and EVERYONE in the OR immediately said "Oh she's a Scarlet for sure!".

From the start the only real issue I had with Scarlet was in my trying to think ahead about other kids teasing her by making fun of her name with things like "Scar" (as part of Scarlet) or "Scary Scarlet". But then because of the super "scary" manner in which she came into the world, and the nice little "scar" that her mommy was going to have from her surgeries - EVERYTHING truly seemed perfect for her to be named Scarlet (including the Scarlet red color she was in places when she first started to pink-up from the initial oxygen).

So there you have it! Miss Scarlet Ann Shockley is a perfect name - just as perfect as she is!

Miss Scarlet is born (in the most frightening of ways)!!!

Daddy holding Scarlet for the first time 6 hrs after birth & just 30min after her breathing tube was removed.

On Wednesday 5/23/07 our little girl was born into the world at 5:39pm. But she and Mommy had quite the ordeal in making that happen.

Little Miss Scarlet & mama had the scariest delivery imaginable - so frightening and awfully surreal it was way, way beyond a tension-filled episode of "ER" or the dramatic last act of the 1988 Kevin Bacon/Elizabeth McGovern movie "She's Having A Baby" (which ran through my mind as everything was occurring).

Here's what happened:

Ginger's labor was progressing smoothly Wednesday afternoon and she was weaned off the contraction inducing medicine due to her own natural contractions taking over. Her epidural was taking care of the pain and the rate of dilation was lining us up for something around an 8pm delivery.

At around 2:30pm Wed. - everything still normal.

Then all of a sudden at 5:15pm Ginger started complaining of severe lower back pain and pain also from the front through her epidural (which shouldn't be possible). She then started feeling sick to her stomach and then started to become somewhat unresponsive. At the same time the baby's fetal monitor started going crazy and showing the baby's heart rate going wild from very slow to extremely high. The nurses burst into the room and started giving Ginger oxygen and trying to get her and the baby to normalize. Nothing was working so they immediately wheeled her right out of the room and into the Labor & Delivery operating room for an emergency C-Section. Within four minutes they had the baby out and being attended to by a separate team of neonatal intensive care doctors and nurses. Little Miss Scarlet wasn't breathing on her own when they pulled her out so they had to intubate & bag her to get oxygen to her. Within a few moments she started to pink up and began moving a little on her own. They quickly took her (and a very scared Daddy) away to the NICU while they went about sowing Ginger back up.

However Ginger's blood wasn't clotting. Our doctor worked for an hour to get her uterus to stop bleeding and calm down, but she was bleeding at such a rapid rate (they had to give her 8 units of blood - and a full-term pregnant woman typically only has approx. 6 units in her entire system) that they had to do a second emergency surgery on Ginger and do a hysterectomy. It was touch and go for awhile even after that due to the fact that while the hysterectomy solved the biggest area of blood loss, she still wasn't clotting in her other incision points. But after being sedated, put on a ventilator, and placed in the Intensive Care Unit where all the best Critical Care Specialists worked on her through the night giving her more blood (11 units total), platelets, massive amounts of fluids and other medicines, Ginger began to stabilize. She regained consciousness at about 5am and later that day by 4:00pm (Thursday 5/24), she started normalizing to the level that they were able to take her off the ventilator & remove her breathing tube.

Ginger with her daddy in ICU at 1:30pm Thurs.

Ginger continued to get stronger and Friday morning they had her sitting up in a chair and was where she could be transferred out of the ICU and into a regular hospital recovery room. During the transfer Ginger was able to make a short stop to the NICU to see her little baby girl in person for the very first time!

Ginger's ICU nurse getting her settled in a regular room.

Mommy down in NICU with Scarlet for the first time!

Ginger spent Friday night and Saturday night in that room and then on Sunday afternoon Ginger got transferred down to the second floor to a regular antepartum (after delivery) recovery room. At the same time as we got there, Scarlet was transferred out of the NICU to the normal nursery and since both Mommy & baby were on the same floor, we finally got to have little Scarlet in the room with us.

A nurse from the nursery bringing Scarlet to Mom's new 2nd floor room.

Scarlet in her nursery cart with her NICU name card.

Baby Scarlet's story though scary at the start, was a much smoother journey (even though she was without her Mommy for a few days).

Baby Scarlet just 26 minutes after her scary birth.

She got her breathing tube out a few hours after birth and progressed normally in all areas after that. Daddy first got to hold her & get the GREAT picture at the top of this post and the one below of him & Nana just 6 hours after she was born and about 30 minutes after her breathing tube was removed.

Proud Daddy & Nana with little 6hr old Scarlet.

Scarlet was in the NICU for close monitoring for a few days but progressed rapidly. She had her IV taken out on Saturday and could have been transferred to the regular nursery then if not for just a slight case of jaundice. Daddy & Nana & Aunt Amy spent time with her there and Daddy got to feed her several times and even change his very FIRST diaper!

So how do you change one of these things anyway??

Nana's first grand-daughter!

Aunt Amy has never seen a baby THIS cute!

After 24 hours of "photo-therapy" Scarlet was transferred Sunday afternoon to the nursery which is what allowed Mommy (both on the same floor) to finally have her in Ginger's hospital room.

Scarlet's cool neon blue "Bilirubin" light blanket.

After spending one more day in the hospital on Monday to run additional tests on both Ginger and Scarlet, Tuesday afternoon (about 9 hours before the time we came into the hospital the week before to induce) both were discharged and we all finally came home together.

Mommy & Scarlet in the car to finally go home!

So what happened?

Something called a "Placental Abruption" that also caused an onset of a blood condition called "Disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC)".

The Placental Abruption likely brought on the DIC. But as to why the abruption happened, no one knows really. Everything with Ginger's pregnancy had been smooth as glass with practically no problems at all until things went south in the span of a few seconds that Wednesday evening.

All I can say is that if it hadn't been for the fast actions of the Medical Center of Plano's Labor & Delivery nursing staff (esp. Gail, Jodi, & Leeann), our wonderful OB/GYN (Dr. Walsh), along with all the other doctors, specialists and nurses in the ICU & NICU, Ginger and baby Scarlet would not be alive today! (Pictures of them to follow in another future post.)

God was truly watching over us and guided those highly-trained people to help us at every step! For everyone (including our doctor & nurses) who prayed for Ginger & Scarlet - THANK YOU!!!