Texas

Tuesday, March 18th, four days after Brycen was born we got the terrible news that my dad, who had been battling cancer during the past year, had taken a turn for the worse and would not last much longer. John, Bryce, and I immediately headed to Texas in hopes of getting to Houston before my dad passed away. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the airport for our 2:00 flight, the 9:30 am flight still had not left yet due to bad weather in Houston. After talking with the airlines and explaining our situation, John was able to get the three of us on the 12:30 pm flight (which left D.C. at 4:00). We were even able to manage to find two seats together - a real blessing since I am not sure I could have handled taking care of a 4 day old all by myself. When we arrived at the Houston airport, the weather was still bad so our plane had to circle the airport for quite some time. Finally, the pilot determined that we needed to fly to New Orleans in order to refuel the plane and wait for the weather to pass. Now John and I were worried about how Bryce's ears would deal with take off and landing so hearing that he would have to endure two take offs and two landings was terrible news for us - not to mention that we knew that every minute counted in trying to get to see my dad. Bryce was the best baby imaginable. He hardly cried and slept most of the flights. We finally arrived in Houston around 11 pm but just missed getting to see my dad before he passed away.

We don't have many pictures from Bryce's first few days in Texas since we were busy making funeral arrangements. To complicate things further, Bryce's body was having trouble regulating his Bilirubin so the first several days were in Texas we had to take Bryce to a lab to have his blood tested to see if his Bilirubin levels were falling. Had they continued to get higher, they would have had to admit him to the hospital and place him under some special lights to get his levels to drop. Luckily the day of my dad's funeral the levels began to drop and the doctors determined that Bryce would be fine without a hospital visit. However, the few pictures we do have of these early days in Texas, Bryce is pretty yellow! Luckily, I was not knowledgable enough to know how yellow he was and John and I just thought he was nice and tan! Had we realized how yellow he really was, we probably would have worried even more!