Sorry I haven’t written any e-mails back or haven’t blogged the last couple of days but we have a new member of the family, Savannah Melody, 1 pound, 12 ounces, 13 inches long delivered at 29 weeks gestation!

Ben and Isabel had been at our house on Thanksgiving, Ben Making the turkey and Isabel making her wonderful, glorious, delicious, tasty, (did i say wonderful?) spinach dip. Ben has been making the turkey since he was a little boy and it is so moist and delicious i started salivating like Pavlov’s dog just thinking about it. Of course I salivate like Pavlov’s dog without…oops, too much info…sorry. Seriously, if you have ever had Ben’s turkey, you would never want to have turkey anywhere else. I doubt that even deep-fried Texas would compare, and I don’t say that lightly, knowing how many Texans read this. You add Isabel’s spinach dip to the table, and, well, I had planned to try my hand at making up a “Grampaw Jones” type of poem, but don’t have the time now.

Anyway, they came over Saturday evening to graze leftovers and Isabel didn’t feel good and hadn’t felt the baby move for about 24 hours. This was unusual in itself because the baby had been constantly moving around and almost generally making her sick. We called the hospital and they said she should drink some orange juice and if they still didn’t feel any movement, bring her in. Twenty minutes went by and we all decided that it couldn’t hurt anything for Ben to take her and have her checked out. That was about, oh, maybe 7 O’clock. I’m not sure. Someone will correct me if I have the times wrong. We got a call almost immediately saying that they had heard the baby’s heartbeat and it sounded healthy, but Isabel was having other problems that they couldn’t figure out for sure and they decided they would keep her there.

The symptoms were sounding like preeclampsia and by 6 O’clock in the morning, it was decided that the baby would have to be taken by Caesarian. They would move her from the hospital she was at, Penrose Community Birthing Center here in Colorado Springs, which is an excellent facility for any kind of birth that is even close to using the word “normal” in it, but the baby was 29 weeks gestation and only 26 weeks in size. The doctors thought the best place for this birth would be at Memorial Hospital, also in The Springs. Memorial has a reputation for having the finest Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in the state, rivaling even Denver’s Children’s Hospital and in the top such care units in the nation! Before they could get her moved, however, more problems arose and Ben got a call saying they were going to operate at 9 O’clock right there at Penrose. Apparently, conditions had worsened. Well, Ben raced over there and we dropped off Grandma and the girls at church and drove at speeds that were, I admit, somewhat in excess of the limit. In fact, I probably would have made Susan B proud and probably would have beaten even her.

We got there and met the rest of Isabel’s family that we hadn’t met before and we waited. Penrose had called in a team from Memorial to assist. At 9:22 the baby was born. Ben said she came out fighting and fussing like crazy. It took them all day to get her condition stabilized with a couple of dramatic, potentially sad moments, but they stabilized her. Without the C-Section, neither mom nor baby stood a chance of surviving, and now they had raised their chances to above 70%. When they got the baby stabilized, they moved her to Memorial in a mobile ICU! A full ICU crew staffs this ambulance. The baby was so stable by now (now being around 2 O’clock) that when they left they didn’t even use sirens or lights. Therefore, the baby is at Memorial, the mom is at Penrose, and both are doing wonderfully.

Savannah Melody. 1 lb, 12 oz, 13 in. She’s a beauty, what you can see of her beyond the tubes and wires and such. I am going to try to take some digital pics with some sort of frame of reference for her size.