March for Babies 2010

Team Hallie & Olivia will be proudly walking in the 2010 March for Babies.

As everyone who has been following this blog knows, our daughters, Hallie and Olivia, were born at 23 weeks and 4 days, on June 11, 2006. Olivia lost her struggle when she was 18 days old; Hallie was hospitalized for four months and, while not free of the consequences of prematurity, she is now a happy, active, and vibrant 3.5 year old. The research sponsored by the March of Dimes into surfactant -- a sticky substance that inflates the lungs of babies -- helped give our girls a fighting chance.

Research into preventing prematurity, including 17P (17 alpha-hydroxyprogesterone), helped Sharon carry Lea to term. The March of Dimes helped get 17P approved by the FDA and getting insurance companies to cover this therapy, which prevents 10,000 premature births a year.

The March of Dimes is engaging in more efforts to support families of babies who are in the NICU or who have 'graduated' from neonatal intensive care units. We know how trying it is to have a baby who is hospitalized long term. And we also know how much support families need in dealing with the consequences of prematurity once they have left the NICU: many, like Hallie, have problems that persist throughout their lives.

We hope that the research that the March of Dimes is doing will prevent quite so many babies from being born so early and will assist the parents of preemies navigate the roller coaster ride that results from their babies' early birth.

We hope that you can join us for this year's March for Babies on April 25, 2010 or that you will sponsor our family team.

Thank you for helping us give all babies a healthy start!

To make a donation, visit my personal Web page here or click on the Team Hallie and Olivia widget off to the right.

And for those of you who have already contributed to our effort to support the March of Dimes: Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

And please remember that any amount will help; every five or ten dollars will help March of Dimes prevent prematurity and invest in research that will improve the outcomes of babies like Hallie and Olivia who were born way too early.

Hallie and Eliza Grace's Ring Around the Rosey

Yesterday, we had a very fun playdate with Eliza, her mom, Anne, and her grandmother, Bessie. We were too lame to remember to bring our camera (imagine that!) but Anne took some great pictures and video footage of our girls, who demonstrated that they are very much into joint attention play and not parallel play.



This playdate came on the heels of another fun day spent at Jake and Gina's (pictures to follow), which immediately followed our impromptu belated celebration of cousin Hannah's sixth birthday. The week also included a grueling 2.5 hour assessment of Hallie for preschool services, a fun visit by my best friend from college, Steve, and his charming daughter, Nina and a meeting with the developmental pediatrician at CHOP who, for now, cleared Hallie from a diagnosis that places her on the autistic spectrum (though she warned that we need to follow Hallie and might reassess this later on; meanwhile, she's just registering as a kiddo with an expressive language disorder that hampers her pragmatic use of speech who has raging sensory issues). I will blog about these events later on but I just wanted to provide yet another series of excuses about why I am such a lame blogger right now!

Not only am I a lame blogger, but we have also neglected to form a real team for this year's March for Babies. So, at the eleventh hour, I'm forming a team for the sole sake of trying to raise some much needed funding for the March of Dimes. Click here if you'd like to contribute in honor of Hallie and Lea and in memory of Olivia Skye. And check back later this week for a longer update that will hopefully include an even greater VFQ (vomit free quotient), which now stands at 65 days and counting for 2009.

March for Babies Update

We're in the wee small hours before our big march, and I just wanted to provide a short update to let you know that we've managed to raise almost (but not quite) $2800. That's a bit down from last year (when we somehow miraculously cleared the $4000 mark), but none too shabby.

We'd like to thank our neighbor, Marilyn, for joining our team this year and one particularly generous anonymous donor who wishes to remain anonymous for a contribution of a little more than half of our team's proceeds for March of Dimes. This particular person has been with us all the way, literally through thick and thin on this journey, and we adore him and his loved ones tremendously. Anonymous donor, if you read this, you rock!

Anyway, there's still time to contribute, so please click on the link on the sidebar if you haven't already done so, and wish us luck tomorrow on our walk (truth be told, since it's hard to keep a toddler in a stroller and her grandmother, Bubbe Jean, who came down to visit from NY will have a hard time making the walk, too, we'll be doing an abbreviated version of the 6 miles and celebrating our team's success over brunch. But still, think about adding your 5 or 10 or more dollars to our team's fundraising efforts for this worthy cause that is near and dear to our hearts!

March for Babies Team Hallie&Olivia Update

We've been fundraising really well for the March of Dimes these past 24 hours or so. So far, we've raised about $2500 dollars--about 80% of that in the last day or so (one very large donation and lots of really respectable ones), and we've added an important walker--Aunt Renee, who will happily NOT be having a micropreemie (her partner Kim is just over 29 weeks pregnant) but we still have a ways to go. Our goal is to surpass our total from last year, which was over $4000. We're taking a page from recent fundraising endeavors and asking folks to contribute whatever they can---no donation is too small. If all you can give is $5 or $10, that's great with us. If all of us band together and contribute what we can to fight prematurity, then maybe we can make the survival odds for our kids (read my last post) better than they currently are.

So please consider supporting our team. All you need to do is click on the link below:



And speaking of outcomes, Hallie hit an important milestone this afternoon: independent sliding at the local toddler playground (Three Bears Park at 3rd-4th and Delancey). We hung out there for a couple of hours after her nap this afternoon, and at first she was very timid about using the slide and even seemed to backslide (so to speak) in terms of being willing to push herself off of the slide once I positioned her on it. But after a couple of times where I spotted her as she climbed up the steps and toddled over to the top of the slide, she began to do this, and position herself from standing to sitting, on her own. At first she waited for me to climb back down and coax her to slide down but a few minutes later, she began to slide down on her own without waiting for me to get back down to the bottom. She'd sit down, propel herself, land, and then race back over to the steps to begin her climb again, over and over. She must have done this about 25 or so times total. I am so very proud of my independent little girl!

Walk America 2007: Team Hallie & Olivia

I'm finally getting a chance to post about our experience at Walk America this past weekend. First, the weather was great. This cannot be taken for granted---we've had miserable weather much of the (alleged) spring here in Philly and finally, finally, something went in our favor. This made getting up at the right early hour of 6 am marginally tolerable (this seemed especially early since we had about 10 people over for an elaborate dinner the previous night. Even with using paper plates and grilling, a dinner party still leaves more dishes than I am eager to do). Anyway, we all got up early, donned our Team Hallie and Olivia t-shirts and headed off (in a three car caravan) for the Art Museum district. There we met up with the other 30 or so members of our team (thank goodness for cell phones!) that included two of Hallie's primary nurses, Grammy, Bubbe Jean (my mom), Grandma Sandy (Hallie's honorary grandmother and Aunt Laura's mother in law), Aunt Laura and all the kids, our friends the Zagurskys and Barags (we were walking not only for Hallie and Olivia but also for Maya and Elana), three of our neighbors and their kids, and numerous friends from all over Philly. It was quite a crowd and, sadly, my photos do not do it justice.



We took off at a nice clip but the team kind of dissolved not long into the walk--it turns out that nurses *are* quick on their feet. Some of us surged ahead, others of us lagged behind, and many of us took advantage of the sunshine during some well deserved breaks:



Others enjoyed the sun while striding along. Here's a nice pic of our friends Carmen and Vicky and their granddaughter Mia:



And here's a lovely shot of adorable Maya Zagursky looking ultra hip in her shades:



Hallie definitely needed her baby bans in this shot:



As I said, these pictures don't do the event justice. And most importantly, beyond walking for our health and to raise awareness about prematurity, we were walking to raise a lot of money to help save babies. And raise money we did: we ended up surpassing our (ever more ambitious) goal -- the tally so far is a whopping $4388. Way to go Team Hallie & Olivia. And hopefully we'll raise even more next year!

Catching Up With Friends from the ICN

On Tuesday, we had our first really warm day since January (yes, that's correct: January. Global warming has wreaked havoc with our climate here--as everywhere else). It was simply gorgeous out and, unlike a couple of months ago, I'm relatively certain that we're not going to descend into the frozen tundra like hellishness again this season. Anyway, it was quite warm and sunny and Hallie--who is teething furiously--was fussier than average, even after a lovely lavender-infused (and purportedly calming) bath. So I decided that it was time to put her in her stroller and take her out for a nap. Within seconds she was asleep and I was having a grand time navigating the various potholes wrought by a combination of an overly zealous demolition crew for Philadelphia Gas Works (and an underly zealous road paving crew related to the same notoriously corrupt and poorly run institution that claimed most of my salary this past winter). We sped through the park, up and down the streets, and had a good snooze. Then I headed off in the general direction of Whole Foods Markets (which claims the portion of my salary that does not go directly to PGW). While speeding along 8th street, I had that familiar old feeling: this was part of my twice or thrice daily walk to Pennsylvania Hospital from the house all summer and now that it's sort of summer again, the route was evocative of all sorts of emotions. I decided to give the ICN a call to see whether Hallie's daytime primaries were on, and to use their presence (or lack thereof) as a sign of how far of a walk down memory lane I wished to embark.

It turns out that both of Hallie's daytime primaries--Meghan, whom we last saw in February at Hallie's home-longer-than-hospitalized party and Brie, whom we hadn't see since discharge--were working that day. This sealed the deal and it was off to the ICN. We arrived at the hospital a few minutes later and it seemed as if the security/front desk folks who used to see us daily did not recognize us anymore. While waiting for the pathetically slow elevator, several nurse-types (at least scrubs-wearing personnel) wondered if we were off to visit a baby in the regular nursery. I said no--we were off to visit the place where this baby spent the first four months of her life.

We got off on 2 and immediately ran into one of the moms to whom we grew close this summer. Shelly was back with baby Suhaila, a former 24 weeker who is now a robust and extremely cute 10 lbs. 6 ounces, for a developmental followup. She had just gotten done visiting with Suhaila's primaries and showing them how big their little girl had grown. It was great to see them and we are going to be in touch to set up a playdate now that RSV season is almost over.

While I was catching up with Shelly and Suhaila, Meghan and Brie came out front (they hadn't yet been informed of our presence, so this was sort of by chance). They were amazed and thrilled to see their baby and, for the next half hour or so, we all hung out in the lobby (since I wasn't scrubbing in and had no intention of seeing whether Hallie still fit into a giraffe bed, let alone expose her to infections!). We saw lots and lots of old friends---Dagmar and Stacy, who spent more sleepless on-call nights trying to figure out how to stabilize Hallie; Bonnie, who was responsible for tweaking her vent settings for a very long time and then fighting with Hallie over the administration of her albuterol puffs; and tons of nurses who took care of her (I am pretty sure that only one nurse never had Hallie, and he was the one recruited to administer chest compressions to her on her one month birthday, when she decided to celebrate by bradying in a particularly bad way). Everyone was impressed by how round Hallie's head is (they turned her regularly, like you would a rotisserie chicken, in the hopes of avoiding preemie head, and all that hard work paid off, even if it pissed off Hallie at the time). And it was also nice to see a bunch of moms whom I did not know, because, as one of them put it to me, somewhat wistfully, 'it's good to see that they do get bigger.'

If that wasn't enough, Hallie had another playdate today with Maya and her mom, Rachel. They went to the park, swung on the swings, and napped in the sun. They also played a fierce game of tug-o-war with the Skwishy Manhattan Baby Toy. Hallie apparently won, but hopefully we'll be able to get Maya one of her own before her birthday next month (there's a back order on them right now, but we have ways....)

Anyway, it was great catching up and now that spring is here I hope that we get to see some of our ICN friends more often.

This is, of course, a perfect lead-in to a shameless plug for all of Hallie's ICN friends to join us to walk in Walk America for the March of Dimes in exactly one month from today. Many of you have been very generous in your support and we are vastly grateful to you. But we'd like some more walkers on our team (and hope that the ICN mommies and medical staff, in particular, would consider joining us). Here's the URL again-- Team Hallie and Olivia ---please consider walking with us because we would like nothing better than to put the Pennsylvania Hospital Intensive Care Nursery out of business. Barring that, let's just get some more research money earmarked to help save kids like Hallie and Olivia (and Suhaila and Maya and Elana) and help improve the outcomes of preemies and micropreemies everywhere!

Sorry about the utter lack of pictures in this post---I promise to be better about this really soon