The Good, the Bad and the Oogly of our first 2 weeks

On Friday, March 28th, our cute little Memphis was born.

On Sunday, March 30th, we got to bring Memphis home to meet Merrick for the first time. Merrick just adores Memphis but as you can see Memphis isn't too fond of all the love just yet.

On Wednesday, April 2nd, Merrick had to be taken to the Emergency Room because of that little red dot near his left eyelid. It's called a Strawberry Hemangioma and is basically an abnormal build up of blood vessels on the skin. We first noticed it in February and took Merrick to see the eye doctor then but he informed us that Merrick was really too young to do anything about it now so he said to wait and see what happens. I guess these things are suppose to go away on their own but Merrick has a terrible habit of picking at his face and on Wednesday he picked at this teeny tiny thing and made it bleed like crazy. It was during his nap so we didn't see it until the blood was everywhere. The blood wouldn't stop coming so we took him to the ER and had them catarize it. They basically burned the wound shut but didn't put any patches over it to cover it. They asked us to make sure he doesn't touch it.

This is him and aunt Meg on Wednesday night as they got ready for bed. On Thursday, April 3rd when Merrick woke up in the morning he rubbed his eyes of course and started the bleeding up all over again. Sean and Meghan took him back to the ER and he came home like this.

My poor son. Both doctors that we saw at the ER said there was very little else that could be done. On Friday, April 4th, we took Merrick to see our Pediatrician and he too said there was very little we could do. So band-aids until the wound healed was going to be our only solution. Unfortunately Merrick hates this kind of stuff on his face so anything we put on would get peeled off in the same night. We somehow managed to get through the weekend and Merrick was able to leave the wound alone until Tuesday, April 8th. My mom was here and sleeping in one of the bunk beds with Merrick that morning and Merrick had managed to pull off his band-aide and open the wound again. My mom came out at around 6 in the morning to get some more towels to catch the blood. She didn't want to wake us up but I was already awake feeding Memphis so I woke up Sean and my mom and him headed to the ER again. We thought that they would catarize it again that's the only reason we thought we'd try the ER one more time but to our surprise my mom was able to slow the bleeding down with leaves from a tea bag so by the time we got to the ER it wasn't bleeding as much so they didn't want to catarize it again considering that's not a fool proof plan to stop it from opening up again. But the good news is the doctor that was there recommended we take Merrick to the Children's Hospital in Madera and have this hemangioma removed immediately. He called over there and faxed over Merrick's history and we have a surgery appointment set up for Monday, April 14th. It feels like forever since Merrick had two more bleeding mishaps yesterday. We've learned that he can't sleep by himself and that he picks at his patches and face in his sleep so whoever sleeps with him has to push his hands away from his eye constantly. Tonight we've put 2 band-aids on him with some extra medical tape, an eye patch over the band aids, mittens over his hands and tape over the mittens and he's sleeping with my mom so that she can make sure he doesn't mess with anything and take anything off. Merrick has been a trooper through all of this and we pray that everything will go well on Monday. I would have never thought that our first two weeks of having Memphis would have ever been like this. We are all pretty wiped out but we keep truckin' on. Keep us in your prayers. Lots of love.