Happy Mothers' Day

Yesterday, Hallie woke up grinning ear to ear. It was an important day for her (and us): it was her first Mothers' Day (plural...this is going to end up being an expensive holiday for Miss Hallie Rose - but we are worth it, right?!).

I swear that in this next shot (taken right after the big smile), our little girl was winking at me:



Yesterday morning was also the first time this season that the rose bush in our backyard was in full bloom. Here's a shot of that very first rose:



This is a pretty special rose bush. Sharon got it for her Nana years and years ago for Mother's Day and Nana planted it in her garden in Somers Point New Jersey. Every time the rose bush was in bloom, Nana would call up Sharon and report on how beautiful the roses looked. Sharon was touched by this but thought that it was a little odd that Nana was so taken by the small but sweet gesture of her granddaughter buying her a rose bush.

That was until we acquired the rose bush and planted it in our own garden. Nana's health was failing by the time I had the pleasure of meeting her (and Sharon); she was already past 80 and unable to live on her own. Her daughter (Jan, also known on this blog as Grammy) and granddaughters (Sharon and Aunt Laura) agonized over the decision, but eventually realized that Nan would be much safer living in an Assisted Living situation than in her own home--she had simply grown too frail and too unable to take care of herself any longer. The facility they chose was right around the corner from Aunt Laura's, and the kids (Megan and Sarah) could bike over after school to visit their great grammy.

When Jan set about to sell Nan's home, the one stipulation in the contract was that the family could dig up the rosebush and take it with them. And that is how it came to pass that Nan's Rose ended up in our Philly backyard.

Right after we transplanted the rose, we had to have the bricks in the back of our house repointed. Now this is not just any repointing--our house is very old (c. 1820s) and the kitchen/bath addition (which is where the work needed to be done) dates back to the 1880s. Back then, the bricks they used were softer and so was the mortar. We needed good masons with backgrounds in Historic Preservation (fortunately Sharon's architectural specialty) and they needed to use high-lime mortar.

A lot of that mortar ended up in the bed where the rose was planted and Sharon nearly went ballistic.

Little did we know that roses love lime and that this (plus a few miraculous touches from Nan) is why it's such a prolific bloomer.

Two years ago, due to a combination of old age, frailty and a variety of illnesses, Nan died. On the day she died, June 28th, the rosebush bloomed like it never had before: it had over 35 perfect, full roses and it looked gorgeous.

Last year, a year to the day from Nan's death, we lost our precious Olivia Skye, who was named for the great grammy she never knew. On that day, once again, our rosebush was in full bloom.

And yesterday, our first Mothers' Day, once more it was in bloom (there are another 15 or 20 roses getting ready to pop right now).

Nan's rosebush serves as a guide to us: it provides us with beauty at times of deepest sorrow and reminds us that life goes on, and that life is fleeting, all at once. It is strong and full and faithful and graces us with shade and color. And its roses are the most amazing thing I've ever seen: they start out tight and yellow tipped with flame red; they open to a soft buttery yellow color, turn hot pink as they begin to pass, and then finally turn white before they die.

So I went out in the morning with my pruning shears and, after capturing an image of that very first rose of the season, cut the rose and removed its thorns and wrapped its stem in a wet paper towel so that it would stay moist and fresh, and brought it and Hallie's card to Sharon as she began to wake from sleep.

Later on, the three of us went to Pastorius Park to picnic near Olivia's Grove. The trees were planted last fall (Sharon helped) and they have gotten a lot bigger already:



We brought a lovely lunch for ourselves and a can for Hallie to suck on. Seriously. The kid loves nothing better than grabbing at my diet coke cans and shoving the cool metal in her mouth. Unfortunately, when they are open (which they are often open since I do enjoy drinking out of them and not just licking the cans myself), this leads to spillage and the potential for cutting little fingers. So I bought Hallie her own can of soda and she seemed to enjoy it just as much:



Here's a nice couple of shots of Hallie with Sharon in the park:



Hallie's still clapping:



Hallie also enjoyed playing with (mauling, really) the pinwheel I bought her the other day:



We brought a pinwheel for Olivia to the park and Sharon planted it in front of the biggest tree in the grove:



All in all, we had a lovely yet bittersweet day on our very first Mothers' Day. It was wonderful to spend it as a family and to watch Hallie having so much fun and taking in everything but we missed Olivia even more than we usually do (which is sort of hard to imagine since neither of us ever has a moment when we don't miss Olivia Skye). It was nice to go to her grove and feel her presence and talk about her and, when Hallie is older, this will be a place where we can share our thoughts and memories of her sister with her. And it is a beautiful, peaceful park that is so full of life and I am glad that we chose it as a site for memorializing Olivia.

And Let's Give a Big Hand To...

Hallie Rose, who has learned how to clap.

We've been working on this for a week or two but Hallie redirected the clapping project into the "gimme five" project. Last week, she was givin' us skin whenever she could (something that no doubt will thrill her daytime primary nurse, Meghan, since Meghan was always giving Hallie high-fives in the ICN). Anyway, yesterday, for some unknown reason, she decided that she was ready to become a full-fledged audience member.

Here's Hallie posing in her Phillies' cap (she has a whole toddler uniform; us Philadelphians are suckers for losing teams that break our hearts every season and I want her to get started early on this).



Click on Hallie Clapping Hands to see for yourself how well Hallie claps hands.

Needless to say, Hallie is very proud of herself and we're very proud of her!


For those of you eager for a feeding update: it's going better. We're mixing pediasure and enfamil AR ready to feed at a 3:1 ratio (the ER doc assured us that this was okay) and she's keeping it down. She's now back up to 20-23 ounces a day and seems well hydrated.

And, finally, yes, those rumors that Hallie is moving forward with her crawling are true; we just don't have video proof of it yet but I'll try to capture some images and post them later...

Food Update, Etc.

No pictures tonight, I'm afraid! We're getting a nifty new camera and I think I may hold out until it arrives. Sharon did take some video of Hallie today on the grass, but I'm not sure how one uploads video to blogger.

Anyway, I just wanted to provide a brief update on how Hallie is doing. So, Sharon took her to the pediatrician on Monday for a sick visit after Hallie had thrown up around 10 times in 3 days. This was our ped's office but not the pediatrician whom we regularly see (he is on vacation but weighed in on email; I love it that he's electronically on top of things and that we don't need to go through the office and leave messages with nurses. Less gets lost in translation even though, as Sharon pointed out to me, I need to learn how to provide bullet pointed sound bites. That means losing my long winded style!

The pediatrician whom Hallie saw thought that the problem was not a stomach bug. She also thought that our dose of Prilosec is fine (as did the GI whom we cc'd on correspondence to our doc) . Besides, prilosec doesn't prevent vomiting, it just makes it less painful. So we're not really sure what is causing this vomiting (which is ongoing; it has slowed down some, but we are now hyper vigilant about providing Hallie with many many small meals, and not trying to cram 4 or 5 ounces into her at all sittings). Hence, it's four am nearly and I am up blogging waiting for our next two ounce feed.

If anyone out there experienced anything like this, please weigh in. Hallie has had reflux from the very beginning, but things seem to be getting worse. Or, alternatively, this is some other as yet undiagnosed issue.

The good news in all of this is twofold: first, despite the vomiting, Hallie keeps growing. She put on a whole pound in the past month and weighs what seems like a whopping 15 lbs. 8 ounces. She's still on her personal growth curve---80th percentile or so for height and 25th for weight for her corrected age. Not bad.

Second, we discovered something that Hallie LOVES to drink: pediasure. In desperation, we tried the vanilla flavor. To our noses, it's sickly sweet and it's certainly sticky to clean up, but this is the first thing we've ever put in her bottle (other than juice) that Hallie has sucked down eagerly while awake. This is very exciting. It means fewer attempts to put her to sleep so that she'll eat, a much more pleasant feeding experience generally, and less stress for the moms. We've also found that Hallie loves chicken (and especially chicken gravy). We put some into the mesh feeders but she prefered to suck on an actual piece. In any event, we can hold onto the idea that someday Hallie will eat pineapple chicken and wash it down with a super sweet vanilla milkshake.

So, to sum up: the kid is growing despite vomiting, the vomiting continues, but there is hope on the feeding aversion front.

I'm exhausted, so that's all for now!

Feeding Frenzy

Thursday was a bittersweet day for us around here. It was the day that I defrosted the final bottle of frozen breastmilk.

When the babies were born, Sharon started pumping like crazy because it was one of the few things she could do for the girls that was real, even if they weren't able to drink her milk yet. And, over the tumultuous next three weeks, as the girls first did well for 23 weekers and then embarked on the downward swing of the awful rollercoaster that is NICU life and did so much worse, Sharon kept pumping. Neither Hallie nor Olivia could have more than TPN (total parenteral nutrition) because they had open PDAs and it would be unsafe to feed them just yet. And so the pumping went on and, every day, we'd come into the ICN with bottles and bottles of milk for the freezer in East Nursery. After we lost Olivia on day 18, it was emotionally difficult for Sharon to keep pumping, but she kept on keepin' on because Hallie needed her milk. And so, even through our worry and our sorrow, knowing that Hallie had pulled through her PDA surgery just fine and would soon be "eating" was enough to keep the Medela humming in our household. On her third week birthday, Hallie started to be fed, and she completed her 10 day feeding cycle in 10 days (this is where you increase the amount gavaged through a tube into the babies stomach incrimentally and make sure that digestion is working and that the baby is tolerating things well). At first they only syringed a couple of cc's of milk at a time; then we moved up to a whopping third of an ounce every two or three hours. This was not sufficient to wear down the incredible stash that just kept growing and growing as Sharon kept pumping and pumping.

On one day in July, it looked like this:



Eble milk filled up several shelves of a deep freezer and we were asked to take some home with us to make room for all the milk being produced by all the other micropreemie moms in the unit (remarkably, 3 sets of 23 weekers, several 24 weekers including multiple multiples, and lots and lots of 25 and 26 weekers were in the ICN all at the same time this summer).

That's when we went out and got a second fridge for the basement and started freezing some of Sharon's milk at home.

We were all very hopeful that the stash would diminish quickly once Hallie started to bottle feed. But no such luck. Hallie turned out to have reflux even back then (though she wasn't placed on meds for it until after she came home). After a while, she started to push away the bottle of Sharon's milk, which was very hard for all of us to take emotionally. It's clear to me now that it must have been totally painful for her to eat, and I wish that we would have pushed for her to get on prilosec back then. Well, hindsight is great, and I know that the neonatologists and PAs were worried about the side effects of zantac and prilosec and that, given that Hallie never vomited back then, her reflux did not seem 'that bad.'

Anyway, Hallie was put on enfamil AR, which she tolerated though didn't love, and began to embark on her oh-so-fun bad eating habits. She might suck a bit and take part of a bottle sometimes, but most of the time did not bottle feed completely. This, plus her oxygen requirements, probably led to her being hospitalized a week or two longer than she might have been otherwise.

When we brought home Hallie, we also brought home 200 or so bottles of milk. We weren't sure what the hell we were going to do with them, but they ended up in our basement freezer because we could not bear to throw things out.

At about the same time, Hallie's feeding issues got worse and we lost a lot of sleep around here trying to get her to take any food and keep it in her system. The vomiting started, and so did a serious bout of bottle aversion. After numerous visits to the pediatrician, the GI specialist and many, many sleepless nights, we finally came up with a system that sort of worked. We started to mix ready to feed AR with some powdered AR, with some breastmilk (to thin out the powder and make it a good drinking consistency) and some corn syrup. And so began the gradual decline of our stash of breastmilk. Hallie never did become a great eater, but she ate enough of her super-charged formula to keep growing and growing and we just seemed to all the docs to be another set of munchhausen moms complaining about the bad eating habits of a kid who had no trouble staying on her growth chart.

And this brings us to this past weekend. With the breast milk gone, the formula had to change. On top of this, as Hallie has gotten bigger (she is currently somewhere between 15 lbs. 3 ounces and 15 lbs. 8 ounces---we don't have a precise weight from this past week but she was the former last Monday), her calorie needs have mounted and she has gotten physically stronger and more capable of pushing away the bottle and causing her mommies real physical damage (I say this staring at a Hallie-induced black and blue mark on my thigh; Sharon has a lovely gash on her face where an over eager soon-to-be-toddler 'stroked' her mommy). Anyway, it was time for a switch. But what to do?

The first thing I tried was vanilla and sugar. Bleh. It must not have been sweet enough for our kiddo.

Next, came the fruity cocktail trials.

Coconut cream and coconut milk added to the bottle worked really well the first time around. I had dreams of Hallie kicking back and drinking this:



Alas, what works once does not always work twice.

Next, staying in the fruity drink genre, we added some sorbet (passion fruit and mango) to the bottles and got so-so results. It was a bit messy to mix and I am not sure all the powder got dissolved, and I am not sure that Hallie liked it. Let's face it: it is hard to tell what a kiddo likes when most of the time you have to 'sleep feed' her. (For those of you without preemies without feeding problems, this involves putting your child to sleep and then introducing the bottle. For whatever perverse reason, the child does often start sucking. Hallie almost never has a decent suck while awake, but when asleep often does. I attribute some of this to the fact that she was intubated for so long and that she never associated eating with feeling full---the bottle is an evil invention designed to put her to sleep, not comfort her and certainly not provide her with the energy she needs to be her active little self).

I digress. After the sorbet trials, we changed things up again. Since our issue was getting the consistency of the bottle smooth enough to take while adding extra calories, we thought it might be nice to try adding nectars to her bottle. So I went out and got some organic pear nectar. The baby loves pear juice (she will drink this, just not her bottle!) so I figured that this was a good flavor choice. Little did I know that this was a poor idea. The first time we tried it, Hallie vomited all over herself and her crib. The second time she vomited all over Sharon. The third time we just marginally spared the cute little party dress she was wearing for her two (yes, two) preemie birthday parties yesterday. This seemed too coincidental and we decided that the new bottles had a lot to do with the bout of barfing. When I got home and checked the bottles in the fridge that I had made up yesterday morning, they seemed to have clumps and curdles suggestive of spoiled milk. I was poisoning our child. Great.

So we tossed out all that food and are now back to the drawing board. We're trying to coconut milk and a little AR powder added to the Ready-to-Feed stuff again. Hallie did fine for the 13 ounces we crammed into her between 8pm and 1am yesterday (she was hungry and sleepy---up until that point she had eaten 4 or 5 ounces of formula, 3/4 of a baby food jar---which was amazing in its own right, 2 ounces of juice, and 3 chunks of pineapple that she sucked the hell out of. Pineapple is her favorite food and she would gladly suck on it all day and we'd be happy to serve her vast quantities of it were it not for the obvious choking hazard that it currently poses to our little girl).

So all was well in Hallie feeding land, or at least back to the quasi normal state that feeding Hallie amounts to. Or so we thought. But then came the 3am bottle, and once more, Hallie barfed. I woke up this morning to find Hallie next to Sharon on the futon in our office and, just like yesterday, Hallie's crib sheet (thank god for the miracle sheets that prevent seepage) covered in vomit. Great.

It is possible that we tried to get too much into the kid at one time and that her system could not tolerate it. It is also possible that her reflux meds require adjustment. And it is possible that her tummy is irritated from the assaults of the past few days.

We hope that this was it on the vomitting (we are running low on miracle sheets for the crib). If not, I guess it's back to the doctor's office for us. Of course, our pediatrician is on vacation this week and we go on vacation (we hope!) next week. And we don't have a GI visit scheduled until mid June. So please keep your fingers crossed for us.

Anyway, on other happier notes, Hallie is really getting ready to crawl. She's been flipping over in her crib and getting up on all fours and rocking:



And she has been rolling around like crazy and has figured out how to sometimes make it from a crawling position to a sitting position. This is all very cool and, feeding issues aside, she is a joy to be around. I leave you with one last cute image taken earlier this week:

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!

A Springing Good Time...

I've been totally remiss about posting lately; I am not sure how it is that an entire week has slipped by with nary a word about Hallie, but there you have it. This doesn't mean that nothing is happening in our lives; actually, it's quite the opposite.

First, we have begun to have a real spring---meaning that it's gone from cold to hot really quickly. The tomatos, basil, oregano, thyme, lavender, and mint are planted, and I take Hallie on brief tours of our exceptionally small brick back yard on a daily basis (where she gets to smell all the herbs and pick leaves off of the plants). Here is the garden this past weekend:





Since I had to work last weekend, I was unable to accompany Sharon and Hallie on their big trip to Grammy's house in Egg Harbor Township, NJ. They hung out, played a lot with the cousins, and went on a massive shopping spree (as if the girl didn't already have a groaning closet!). Among the recent purchases were a bathing suit for Princess Hallie and lovely new sandals. Hallie adores the latter, as you can see from the following pictures:



And, of course, it helps that sandals are delicious.




YUM!


In addition to her ever expanding role as a consumer, Hallie had several other neat experiences this week.

Most significantly, she had her six-month NICU followup at the Pennsylvania Hospital ICN. She picked up toys and passed them from one hand to another, sat like a champ, rolled over from stomach to back (she didn't go in reverse, though she had been known to do so at home; she must have heard them say something about this because flipping from back to stomach is her new passion and if anything she is more fluid of a back-to-stomach flipper than vice versa). In essence, she did everything they expected and then some and everyone was pleased with her development so far. We are very far from being out of the woods, but we do take deep breaths with each passing milestone met.

And speaking of milestones, Hallie has also begun to pull herself up into the sitting position on her own and today began to get up on her knees and rock. Crawling is likely just around the corner. Then no one is safe. But everyone is happy.

Given all of this, we've needed to get rid of the mobile in Hallie's crib. We are sad to see it go because it has been such a faithful companion. Hallie loves the Sound and Motion mobile, but lately her interactions with it have been a bit on the aggressive side:



She has pulled off various of the plushy animals and balls attached to the mobile and we decided (based on the sage advice of grammy) that we are better off putting the mobile away now rather than risk Hallie entangling herself in it.

Hallie is also pretty aggressive with her absolute favorite toy, a Bert finger puppet bought for her by her Auntie Neystice. She loves to maul Bert, eat Bert, and earlier today she suspended Bert from his toes (or the puppet equivalent thereof) from her crib bumper (breathable, naturally). I don't have a picture of the great hanging, but I do have a few that generally capture Hallie's relationship with Bert:





Who'd have thought such an innocent little girl cold be so forceful with her toys. This look says it all:




Today, Hallie was just plain cute.



Because tomorrow is our WalkAmerica Walk (let's hear it for Team Hallie and Olivia---we've already raised more than $4000), both grandmothers are in town. Hallie spent the morning playing with us on the big bed, she took a very long (four hour) nap, woke up, played with Grammy and Bubbe , went to the park, swung on swings and then hung out with her pals Karina and Ethan. It's so cute to see how Karina and Hallie light up when one of them enters the other's space, and today Hallie even kissed Karina hello. Ethan was a bit jealous so he insisted that Hallie kiss him goodbye. They are great friends and we feel blessed to have these three little kids grow up together. Even though Hallie is not in this shot, this is a great picture of Ethan and Karina descending the slide in our neighborhood park the other evening:

Pppthhhhhssssttttt

Hallie has a new obsession: her tongue.



It can wiggle and wriggle in all sorts of interesting ways. It curls up, it curls down, it curls all around. Like Hallie herself, Hallie's tongue enjoys acrobatics.

You have to admit that she's a whole lot cuter than Mick Jagger:



It also helps her produce more drool, which Hallie sees as an asset. We're hopeful that tongue+drool=teeth. Keep your fingers (and your tongues) crossed that this is the week that something finally breaks through.

Finally, all of this advanced tongue activity is finally convincing Hallie to move beyond her safe "geh" consonant to a much more daring "beh". Sharon and I are pretty sure that we heard her say something like "bay" (as in 'baby') both last night and this morning.

And just because these pics are so damned cute, here are a couple of non-tongue related shots from this morning's photo shoot.




Happy spring everyone! It's finally arrived here and later on I'll try to post some pics of the salmon-throated daffodils that have popped up in our back yard.

And, speaking of spring, here's one more shameless plug for Team Hallie and Olivia. We are hopeful that next weekend's weather will be just as nice as this one's and that our Walk America Team, which now has around 30 members, will have a blast walking to raise money to heighten awareness about and help prevent prematurity. Hit the link to join our team or help our cause...and for those of you who already have joined and/or contributed, I want to send out a really big thank you. We've already raised above $2500 dollars and are hoping to hit the $3000 mark by the weekend---this is a whole lot more than the goal of $300 that I originally set for myself back in January.

Oh, the Places She Will Go....

It's been another fun, adventure-filled weekend of firsts, seconds, and thirds for Hallie.

Let's take things in reverse order, because that's how they happened:

On Friday, Hallie had her third indoor preemie playdate with her friend Maya. This time, another ICN-mate, Benjamin, who was born right after Hallie, but who is four weeks older than she is in gestational age terms (in other words, he's a 28 weeker), was able to make it, too.

The three kids had a grand time hanging out, comparing notes on their toys, and even playing interactively with one another.

Maya showed off her advanced rolling techniques to Hallie. Our living room became the site of some major preemie acrobatics:

Hallie responded by playing a game of "I'm gonna get you" with Maya:

A grand time was had by all and we're going to try to do this again soon.

Later that evening, Hallie went out to dinner for the second time in a week. The first time (on Thursday), she hung out at the Blarney Stone and watched her friend Josh jam with his Irish band. Hallie, Karina, and Ethan (Josh's one and a half year old son, who also doubles as the harmonica player) really got into the groove. Alas, we have no pictures of this event.

Friday was Aunt Renee's birthday, and Hallie celebrated by sleeping through some excellent fondue at The Melting Pot:

It is too bad but Renee took this picture; the only other one we have (which does contain the birthday girl) features Renee with her eyes closed. We didn't want Hallie to seem like she had any competition in the sleeping department at dinner, so I've decided to upload this image instead.

Then, on Saturday, we packed up the car (OK; SUV, but it does have a car chassis) and headed off to NJ for Hallie's first-ever sleepover at Aunt Laura's and Uncle Bryan's. This weekend was cousin Hannah's fourth birthday party (her actual birthday was about two weeks ago). Even though Hallie wasn't going to be able to attend the party (even in post RSV season, we're eager to avoid unnecessary exposure to germy kids), we did want to celebrate the event with Hannah.

It's amazing how much stuff we "need" on an overnight trip:

I guess we're going to have to rent a U-Haul for Hallie when we bring her down to Aunt Laura's and Grammy's for a week in May!

Anyway, Hallie brought lots of toys and her cousins really enjoyed playing together:

The little cousins (Hannah and Adam) are totally in love with Hallie, and I must say that it seems like the feeling is quite mutual. Not only did they get to play with Hallie all weekend, but they even got to hold her:

Speaking of holding her, Grandma Sandy got to hold the little princess for a while, too. (The birthday hat is courtesy of Cousin Megan, who decided to make Hallie a hat when she was fashioning one for Hannah to wear):

Hallie has continued to sport her haberdashery since returning home. This is Hallie at dinner tonight. Notice that she rejected her turkey dinner and vanilla pudding in favor of the green star from her Fisher Price musical stacker....yum!


But even more delicious than a green star, of course, are Hallie's toes:

Here's the motto from the onesie she's wearing: "If I'm not Happy, Nobody's Happy." Yup...that about sums things up!