Afternoon update (Sunday 12/14)

Carolyn and I took Felix in to see his little brother. Felix pronounces "Max" as "Mack" or sometimes "Baby Mack". The visit went much better than I had expected. No IV trees were knocked over, Max was generally taken to be a good thing, and the tears didn't come until Felix and I left without Carolyn (an unfortunate logistical requirement). Also, Max is out of his lucite box and into a real -- albeit hospital issue -- crib. Nurse B. (who looks like the captain of a junior high swim team) stocked it with all of the crib extras Carolyn brought over last night. I'll add an annotated picture in a separate post.

We learnt a little more about this mysterious study that Dr. H. ordered yesterday. Max is hooked up to twice as many monitors as usual, with the extra leads plugged into a box kept inside his crib. When his statistics look sufficiently distressed the box emits a piercing shriek designed to wake him up and get him breathing again. The designers of this little apparatus failed to take into consideration that (a) NICU babies are hardened against alarms of all types; and (b) one cannot buy a child's toy these days that doesn't blast distorted music or speech out of a cunningly hidden speaker. Many a parent knows the pleasure of attacking an innocent-looking stuffed bunny with a phillips-head screwdriver in the middle of the night after it bellowed "Ha ha ha that tickles" one too many times.

For now, here is a shot of Max in his new crib: