The Holliday Family

Today, Feb 21st is Ruby’s due date; but then you check the blog every day so you know that:)

According to our medical system up until now Ruby has been living in the negatives, as in she was negative 43 days old when she was born and steadily approaching zero days old every day since.

Marla and I are of course very proud of Ruby hitting her zero day and we’re doubly proud of what she has accomplished before she was technically zero days old.  Now some people like to brag about their kids walking early or talking early but in the Holliday house hold, where we tolerate nothing but perfection, that’s just not good enough.

At this time I’d like to celebrate some of the things that Ruby did while most other babies were passing the time in their mothers womb… I give you:

Ruby the first 43 days, a pictoral history

Met 75% of her grandparents

Grandpa Doug Holliday

Grandma Barb Holliday

Grandma Jane Panasik

Toured with Led Zepplin

John, Robert, Jimmy and Ruby on tour

Napped… oh boy did we nap alot:)

The best place to have a nap

Went on a car ride

Ruby calls shotgun!

Had her first bath

Bath and dress up time:)

Meanwhile Kent guarded the house

It’s common knowledge that if you want to protect your house from intruders you don’t buy an alarm system or a pit bull. The wealthy these days, all turn to magic cat to protect their home. Any would be robbers that look into magic cat’s eyes quickly meet their end.

It's rumoured that those glowing green eyes shoot laser beams

Toodles,

Ruby, Mars and Chris

Many of you have bought, donated or given( on the condition that we don’t return them) baby clothes for Ruby.  Marla and I would like to thank you all for clothing our daughter.  However due to the huge amount of friends we have, we now have more than enough clothes to last Ruby for the foreseeable future.

If you have not already bought us something and you feel as though you really need to we are now so booked up that we are currently taking names for people who are willing to buy Ruby clothes for her early teen years.

And if you act now you can reserve your place as the official purchaser of Ruby’s wedding dress.

Don’t scoff at this once in a life time opportunity, kids grow up so fast these days.  Why just last week Ruby had her first male suitor over, see photo’s below.

Which brings us to the part of the post I like to call:

Backstreet boy or Binkley

This is a game where you can vote on the pictures below.  Your job is to guess which of the two photo’s below is the real backstreet boy.

Photo #1	Photo #2
Is this the real backstreet boy?	Or is this the real backstreet boy?

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Please vote for your pick and feel free to discuss the options in the comments section.  The real backstreet boy will be revealed in an up coming post.

Sorry my dad hasn’t done any blogging lately.  He’s been busy.

Until he gets back to it I’ll leave you all with a kiss.

Toodles

Ruby

A kiss to all my fans

The shaved forehead cut

When Ruby was at the hospital, one of the things the nurses constantly struggled with was the best place to put an IV into her.

For tiny babies the best place often turns out to be the head.While it may not be the most aesthetically pleasing place to have a tube coming out of, it turns out to be the best location in-terms of not falling out. The hands and feet move around too much.

To put in Ruby’s IV line the nurses first had to find a vein. In order to do this they had to first be able to see the veins in Ruby’s head.

Now being a Holliday, Ruby of course had a lot of hair on her head and this is what lead to Ruby getting her first hair cut.

Will this haircut adversely affect the rest of her life?

Since this hair cut is a little unorthodox it’s prudent to ask what’s happened to the life of those who’ve had the same hair cut.

Let’s examine a cross section of those people.

Other famous people who’ve had a shaved forehead

David Beckham, he of the $250 million dollar contract, has had a shaved forehead.	Lt. Commander Worf has been in space and battled the Borg. He proudly display's his bald forehead.
Marvin Emnes currently plays for Middlesbrough. He has signed a 4.3 million pound contract. His bald forehead hasn't hurt his career.	When Britney's career went in the toilet what did she do? She shaved her hair into a "Ruby cut". Since the she has appeared on the TV Show "How I met your mother", opend the 2008 MTV music awards and had her last latest album vault all the way to number 1 on the billboard top 100 charts.

The Final Word

From this I think we can safely assume that Ruby’s new hair cut can only help her later on in life.

After 3 and a half weeks in 2 different hospitals we were deemed ready to go home on Tuesday.

On our way home

For those of you who don’t know our schedule, Marla would go up to the hospital at lunch for a few hours and then the two of us would return for 6pm and stay for atleast an hour or two.  Considering the hospital is a good 30 minutes in each direction, we’ve spent alot of our day just on visitations.

So we’ve been busy, but being the multi tasker that I am, I’ve been able to find time to work on what can only be described as a very sweet looking beard.  Please see the first photo for proof.

We have only good things to say about our time at the hospitals and the care Ruby has received.

Due to Ruby’s low birth weight a public health nurse will come to our house a couple of times a week to check up on us for the next 4 months.  On top of this, we have our team of midwives coming to our place 5  or 6 times over the next few weeks.  And of course we have a parade of family members coming out starting Thursday.

There’s really no way that Marla and I can screw this up.

Home activities

Since coming home we haven’t had time for too much.  We’ve basically been doing one of two things:

Taking time for myself

All business, all the time

1)  We’ve been relaxing in bed in between feeds.

Ruby is starting to go through the giant pile of clothes that all our friends have gratiously donated.

Due to her size we haven’t tried to give equal time to each outfit we’ve been given, instead we’ve been having her wear what ever fits at the time.

On the left Ruby is wearing something from the Shandra and Harman winter collection.  To the right she is wearing a sleeper donated by the Guelph girls.

2)  We’ve been on the phone constantly to friends and family.  Needless to say we’ve had a lot of questions and both families have been teriffic.  Thank you:)

I’m not sure who Ruby is talking to in this photo:)

A comparison of cool

Given how cool Ruby’s parents are, it’s only natural to ask…. “How cool is Ruby?”.  Well on the popped collar scale she’s off to a good start.  You can see that she has 2 popped collars.  Compared to the gold standard 0f 4 popped collars shown on the right, Ruby is well on her way to being very cool.

2 popped collars cool

The epitomy of cool

Here are some Photo’s from the past 2 weeks:

With Dad	Here’s a photo of Ruby and dad. As you can see, both of us have plenty of hair. The white dot on the side of Ruby’s head is Velcro (TM) which helps hold Ruby’s shades onto her head. Usually Ruby and Dad will have time together after she has eaten. The astute among you may also see that I am sporting a pretty sweet mustache that was meant for Matt’s wedding.
Resting with soother	Here is Ruby sleeping. She is sporting a wool touque, and fleece vest. You can also see her holding her own soother with her left hand. This is a very advanced maneuver and probably means she has more of her mom than dad in her:)
Wearing shades	Here’s Ruby under a UV lamp.Evidently almost all premature babies are deficient in something called “belly ruben” (sp?).  This has something to do with jaundice.  This condition has since cleared up The white things on her eys are her shades.  I think they may be Oakley’s. You can also see the IV in her head, I’m told that the head is often the easiest place for the nurses to find a vein to put the IV in. The paste like substance on her face helps hold in a feeding tube that goes from nose to stomach.  The tube has since been removed.
Kent eating	This is our cat Kent. He has nothing to do with Ruby, he’s just on here because he is basically awesome in every way. In this photo you can see his vertical black stripes in his coat. I’m no vet but I believe these are racing strips and they help Kent to run fast.

Marla and Ruby

Ruby is now almost 2 weeks old.  Some people have said that they have a hard time picturing what 2 lbs and 11 ozs looks like.

Here is a picture of Marla and Ruby on day 2.  She really is the smallest person we’ve seen.

I’ve gone back to work after taking 4 days off to help Marla.

Marla’s daily schedule consists of making a lunch time trip to the hospitla to feed Ruby for noon and 3.

Together we return for Ruby’s 6pm feeding and we stay for atleast an hour.  Usually Marla will feed and then Ruby and dad have a half hour of story time, though Marla has been know to hog Ruby and cut into my time with her:)

My work has been great in helping us.  They’ve let me work what ever hours I need to inorder to see Ruby, though considering I can work from home as much as I want that isn’t much of a difference:)

As far as we know Ruby will be at the hospital for atleast the next 3 weeks though it is still too far into the future to set a date with any amount of confidence.

As most of you know, we had a bit of a surprise last week and we met our daughter Ruby Josephine Holliday 6 weeks earlier than planned. When we went in to a regular midwife appointment on Thursday, Jan 8 we ended up at the Foothills hospital for tests and told a few hours later that Marla had a serious condition called HELLP syndrome and that the baby needed to be delivered right away. The only cure for HELLP is delivery.

The next day, January 9, Marla was induced and delivered a healthy little 2 lb 11 ounce Ruby naturally at 4:17 pm after a pretty intense 5 hour labour. Though Ruby is small she is mighty and she keeps surprising the nurses and doctors with her progress. She is a feisty one and kicks a lot, one nurse even said she was going to be a soccer player without knowing that we both play so that made us quite proud:)

She started off in intensive care at Foothills  and was transferred to Peter Lougheed Centre late last week to a special care unit that is geared more towards getting the babies home and the parents prepared which is a much better environment for all of us. It does suck a bit because it is far from our house, but we are making it work. She has been gaining weight slowly and as of today she is now just over 3 lbs. She was also taken of IV today and out of the incubator so a big day all around for Ruby!

We are excited to see her grow a bit each day and love our visits where we get to cuddle her and read to her. She likes pulling her Daddy’s hair already, perhaps it is time to get it cut;)
We also wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for there good wishes and prayers and support over the last few weeks. The support has been amazing and we can’t imagine how this time would be without it. We have the best family and friends and feel very blessed right now. We love you all!

Stay tuned for some pics which will come tomorrow! We will try to keep this fairly updated as we know you all want to know how Ruby is doing and see lots of pics.