Six months!!

Elijah had a quiet half-birthday the week after surgery, and today I took him to Dallas for his post-op checkup. He weighs 14.5 pounds and is 25 3/4 inches long. His EEG and heart echo both looked great. The doctor says he has minimal leaking around his tricuspid valve, which is normal, because the right chamber of his heart is pumping 1.5 times the amount of blood a normal heart would pump.

Before the Glenn it was pumping twice the normal amount (all the blood). The next surgery, around 3 years, will take care of that. She also said the amount of leaking she saw in Elijah was about the best they see in babies with his condition post-Glenn, and she was very happy about that.

Mr. E is on *one* medication twice daily, furosemide (Lasix), which is fantastic, considering other HLHS babies we know are on as many as five or more daily meds. His incision is healing beautifully. The last of the steri-strips fell off today, so he can have real baths again. The nurse gave me some adhesive remover to get the rest of the sticky stuff out of his hair from his scalp IV. Thank you, nurse.

Oh, yes, and every time I set him down and he discovered the crinkly paper on all the examination tables, he went into super kicking mode. That wasn't really conducive to an EEG or an echocardiogram, but these people are professional. And they are pediatric heart specialists. They swaddle like nobody's business and provide Baby Einstein videos for his watching enjoyment.

Elijah cannot have any tummy time for at least two more weeks, or a minimum of four weeks total, to give his sternum a chance to heal. We basically need to treat it like a broken bone. He can't roll over yet, and probably wouldn't want to even if he could, but he's getting really good at sitting up and loves to see what's going on.

And in more traditional baby news, baby boy has entered the world of food variety. His reaction to mashed banana was interesting. He has taken all kinds of nasty medicine and liquid vitamins by mouth without batting an eye. From the look on his face as he tasted banana, I might as well have been giving him a dill pickle. Maybe something a little more bland next, like green beans or oatmeal cereal.