Thought for the day.

"Too much of what women do either gets eaten or dirty."  -- Cousin Dibby (82), explaining why she still mows the lawn.

What's new today? (And yesterday?)

Both girls are doing well with nursing.  Showing somewhat more determination than either of their parents, both of them pulled their feeding tubes out early this morning.

The entire CPMC labor and delivery unit had a busy day yesterday.  In absolute terms, San Francisco has the largest ethnic Chinese population of any city in the United States other than New York City -- 152,620 as of Census 2000.  On a percentage basis, Chinese Americans constitute 19.6% of the total population of San Francisco -- the largest such percentage of any city in the United States.  And apparently, in Chinese tradition, 8/8/08 is considered a very auspicious date.  That's why the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to begin yesterday.  And it's auspicious not only for opening an Olympic Games, but also for being born.  Which means scheduled C-sections.  Seventeen of them, or so goes the rumor around the NICU.

Annoyance of the day:  We're required to supply all of our pumped breastmilk in sterile 4 oz bottles provided by the hospital.  According to the procedures, we cannot sterilize and reuse these bottles.  You need two bottles at any given session with the pump (do I need to draw you a picture?), but the production at this point can be consolidated after pumping into a single bottle.  The sterile 4 oz bottles are supplied in a sealed pouch, each of which contains three bottles.  So three bottles are taken out of the pouch.  Two are used.  One used bottle gets rinsed and put into the recycling bin; the other is placed into the refrigerator and then later carried in a cooler to CPMC.  Unless I'm mistaken, it would appear that the perfect number of bottles to include in each pouch would be "two," with "four" coming in a very distant second.  But three?  Now, we don't throw the third one away; we save it for use with another orphaned third bottle at the next session.  I have no idea whether this violates NICU sterility procedures, but I don't have the heart to throw one away each time.  There is probably a "Seinfeld" episode about this, but if so I haven't seen it.