Say "Cheese"

Well without further ado Jessica and I would like to present our new little baby as....

COLBY DREW HILLING

Yes after hours of deliberation, ten minutes here, an hour there and a long "name" meeting at our local Panera, we decided on the name Colby. I use "decided" loosely, as Jess's story is she gave into me as I was pleading for Colby. The list came down to Chase, Campbell and Colby. Others possibilities were Carson, Cody, Connor, Camden and Cameron. We did consider Jack as the middle name but just couldn't do it to the little peanut. Yup, my son is now named after a kind of cheese but hey, everyone loves cheese right? At one point Jess asked if I knew of any famous Colbys, the only one I could think of was the dude who won Survivor a number of yrs back. I think Colby is a good, strong, manly name and this little peanut needs it. This means the name "NotYet" is history but I think Little Peanut will stick around for a while.

Its going to take a while to get used to calling him by his name as we've had so little one-on-one time with Colby, we feel like we barely know him yet. But that did change a bit today as Jessica was able to hold Colby! They told us on Sat. we would be able to hold him before the surgery on Monday so we were geared up for that. But when we got to hospital today the nurse said that seeing as Colby was calm and having a good day and the ICU was quite we could hold him today. It was very exciting and kinda scary too. So it took about 3 nurses and 1 respiratory therapist to get this done. Our main nurse picked up Colby while another moved away the bed, another held all his IVs and another held all his breathing tubes. Then we slid the rocking chair where the bed was and Jess snuck in under all the tubes, plopped in the chair and the nurse handed Colby to her. After situating his tubes they kinda left us alone and Jess got to hold him for around an hour and 20 minutes. It was really great. I'll hold him tomorrow before surgery.

Our game plan tomorrow is to get to the hospital around 6:30am, just in time to get into the room for rounds. Colby has the option to become part of a research study on the affect of insulin and blood sugar levels on healing in babies who've had heart surgery. We are considering it and have to meet with one of the Docs running the study tomorrow morn. Supposedly one of the nurses in the ICU has a daughter who had the same surgery 18 yrs ago, she is doing fine now. We hope to get to speak to her about it and her experiences. Colby is the 2nd surgery for tomorrow so he'll go in anywhere from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. They've been getting us prepared for how he'll look after surgery. We've been told it'll be tough and that we won't fully understand until we see him tomorrow, but ready or not, we'll be there for him.

I'll be updating the blog as much as I can tomorrow, stay tuned.