March of Dimes

We were fortunate in that Emma was born healthy and relatively on time (38 weeks, but not preterm). But I've been reading so many blogs of mothers and fathers whose children have been born way too early, most for reasons they don't know. Today is Prematurity Awareness Day. Report Cards were released, grading each of the states...and guess what? Kentucky scored an F on its Premature Birth Report Card. Here is a link to the report card. Overall, the US received a D. With all of our medical advances, shouldn't we be moving in a different direction?

Pictures

Finally, I'm posting pictures from Halloween. Also pics from the homecoming parade at WKU, and some random pictures.

Football

Emma will not grow up watching Coach Elson. It's a sad day for me (I might be the only one). I have good memories of him from 2002...I'm nothing if not loyal. Also, Brandy, Beth and I thought he was pretty cute in college. Obviously, cute is not enough to cut it as a football coach. This is a picture of Emma watching the press conference today. As you can tell, she was paying close attention to Dr. Selig. She has had to sit though several losing efforts this season, and was frustrated like the rest of us.

I have many pictures still on my camera that I need to post. Emma got to walk in the Homecoming Parade on Friday night. We got lots of compliments, and she behaved. Fortunately she was feeling better by Friday. She had either a cold or allergies for a few days last week. No fever, but since it only lasted a couple of days, I'm thinking it was probably a cold. She's back to her old self now. I introduced pears to her today. She seemed to really like them, but we'll see how her body reacts after a day or two. We've also been able to feed her some of the frozen breastmilk I stored, which I'm pretty happy about. She's still spitting up, but she doesn't seem to be in much pain or discomfort. Her gas has improved a lot! I don't know if the gripe water has anything to do with it, but we're definitely going to keep using it. She's closing in on 15 pounds, and will be 6 months old in 11 days. I've read that babies should double their birth weight by their 6 month birthday, and she has already passed that, so she's doing well. Tomorrow we are planning to take her to her first basketball game at WKU, so we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to get a good pic of her with Big Red sometime this season!