Mike and Robin Headed Home Today

I am getting discharged from the hospital this afternoon, so Mike and I will be sleeping in our own bed tonight. It will be hard to leave Miller here in the hospital, but obviously it is the best thing for him for now. And I don't think Mike will miss sleeping on the tiny couch in my hospital room.

Miller is continuing to improve, slowly but surely. All of his doctors and nurses are great, and we know that they are doing everything they can to get him home with us. It just can't move fast enough for me and Mike, and it's hard not to have a specific time frame for his recovery. However, we do know that it's just a matter of time, and these few days are just a drop in the bucket for the time we'll get to spend with him in the coming years.

Please keep him in your prayers as he continues to get stronger, and thank you all for all the calls, emails and text messages. It means a lot to us.

Baby Miller is a Trooper

Well, Baby Miller has had a very exciting first couple of days. When he was born, even though he was doing some pretty impressive yelling, they suspected that he was having a little trouble breathing, so they went ahead and took him to the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit, in case you are as clueless about these things as I am). Lung problems are very common in little boys that are born a couple of weeks early, so our doctor had warned us that this was a possibility.

I got to see him in the NICU that night after I was done in recovery, and he was resting peacefully in his little tiny hospital bed. He looked awfully sweet, but it was really hard to see him with a tube up his tiny nose and an IV in his foot.

Yesterday afternoon, because he wasn't improving as much as they would like, they did a chest x-ray and found that he has a Pneumothorax , which is a small hole in the lung, common in newborns for a variety of reasons. Although this definitely sounded scary, the good news was that it was small enough to heal on it's own. Unfortunately, they did have to put him on a breathing machine with a tube down his throat to help him breathe while the hole repairs itself, but it's done him a world of good already.

This means he'll be in the NICU for a few more days, and unfortunately, he can't have any visitors (other than me and Mike and his grandparents). It's really hard for us to see him like this, but we know this is only a temporary set-back, and we appreciate all the support from our friends and family. We know that he'll be ready to come home before we know it, and he can't wait to meet all of you!

Miller Allen Brant is Here!

We are so excited to announce that as of 6:01 pm 3/9/09, Miller Allen Brant is here!

I will spare you guys the fun c-section photos and the ones of Miller getting goo toweled off of him, but here are a few fairly sanitized photos from yesterday. As you can see, he's awfully cute, if I do say so myself :) And awfully cranky about being cold.

Here's my first look at him once he was all toweled off and ready to head off to the NICU. He was still fussing a little bit, but he was the sweetest thing I'd ever seen. He's just so little and precious. It's hard to believe he belongs to me and Mike!

Hard to tell who he looks like yet, but once he got calmed down a bit, we could at least start to speculate. What do you guys think? Any guesses?

Because he was a few weeks early, Miller's lungs had a little fluid in them, and they aren't quite done developing, so he is going to have to spend a couple of days in the NICU. The is doing better already as of today, so we are hoping it will be a fairly short stay. It's hard not to have him with us in the room, but we are spending a lot of time with him down there.

He is just darling, and we can't wait to bring him home and introduce him to the rest of his family. Vince, Sadie, Thor, Pumpkin and Stinky have no idea what's in store for them!

Unique Brant

I was surprised by this, but when I looked up the uniqueness of Baby Brant's name (Miller Brant), apparently he will be a one-and-only. I find that hard to believe, but it's fun to think anyway...

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 1 or fewer people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Baby Brant's Shower

Last weekend my awesome friends Courtney, Meri and Jen threw me and Baby Brant a baby shower. It was so much fun, and it really made me feel great to have so many people come to celebrate Baby Brant. He doesn't know it yet, but he has an amazing family and lots of great friends waiting to meet him.

Meri made the cutest cake, and even though Jackson decided to knock it off the table at the last minute, she performed a minor miracle of frosting surgery, and nobody was the wiser. I can't believe she did this herself! I can barely make a Betty Crocker cupcake with frosting from a jar.

It was so great to have so many great friends there, and we had to get a pic of all the Berkner girls, even if we are all a little blinded by the sun. It was especially wonderful to have Desiree in from Norman - we don't get to see her enough down here in Dallas!

We didn't play any shower games (thanks again, Meri, Courtney and Jen) so there was lots of time for standing around and socializing. Here's my mom, Manny and Carol enjoying their drinks. I'll bet my mom was looking for grandma tips from Carol...

Mike came by at the end of the shower to help us get all of Baby Brant's booty home and to ogle Courtney's amazing backyard, complete with Longhorn paraphernalia. I think he was pretty jealous. I know I was!

Gilmore Girls

So, a couple of months ago, I decided to finally listen to Jen and Megan, who had told me how great Gilmore Girls was, and start watching the show from the beginning on Netflix. I figured that I would probably be annoyed by the fast-talking, pop-culture-reference-spewing mother and daughter, but damn it if they weren't right. I love this show.

I am about half-way through the 4th season, and I am so excited every time I get a new dvd in the mail. I actually like and *gasp* respect the characters on the show. They work hard, they care about each other and they do the right thing 90% of the time. The other 10% is what makes the show even more believable, because nobody is too perfect. They all have their faults, and they make mistakes, but not at all in an after school special kind of way.

Anyway, I can't wait to see where the series is headed.

Oh, Boy...

Well, turns out that Baby Girl Brant is actually Baby Boy Brant. At least according to our latest ultrasound. I am still in shock, but she definitely showed us some baby junk that did not show up on our last ultrasound.
Above is a picture that supposedly shows boy...

We also did the whole 3-D Ultrasound thing, so we got a couple of shots of his sweet little face. He didn't want to cooperate, and apparently his head was pretty much wedged between the placenta and the wall of the uterus, so they are a little hard to see...

I like the bottom one, because he looks totally irritated that he was getting poked and prodded by the ultrasound tech. Plus we've been calling him a girl for the last two months, so I'm sure he didn't particularly appreciate that, either.