The Rankin Zoo 

We’re staying home this year - it should be relaxing.

Happy Thanksgiving from Andy Rankin on Vimeo.

Yesterday I took Coral to her first dentist appointment. Leading up to it we tried to make it out to be no big deal - but she seemed to have a bit of instinctive fear of the dentist. I was optimistic though because she actually seems to enjoy going to the doctor and her trip to the ER is something she thinks back on fondly.

As it turns out, she also finds the dentists office to be quite interesting. I’m sure it helped that she had no cavities and no procedures that were all that uncomfortable. The hygienist kept commenting about how easy it was to work with Coral. When we started she said she might try to get a couple of x-rays of her teeth but that most kids on their first visit won’t tolerate it. Well, she managed to get all four x-rays without even a tiny bit of trouble.

So the trip to the dentist turned out to be pretty fun.

Oh, another quick story. Last night Coral complained that she hurt her finger by bonking it on the stairs. When I looked at her finger it looked like she had something under her fingernail. She didn’t want me to mess with it so we just headed upstairs for her bath. Over the next 5-10 minutes she started to fuss more and more about her finger and that it was hurting. I offered a couple of times to try and use some tweezers to see if I could make her finger feel better - but she wanted nothing to do with that.

In looking at it more closely I was convinced that she had something stuck under there. I finally managed to bribe her with candy and she let me take a shot at it with tweezers. She calmed down and was very quiet and I managed to pull a wooden splinter out from under her fingernail - it was about 1/4 of an inch long! Yowie! She was quite brave and only cried a little after I pulled it out. By the time she was done eating her 4 peanut M&Ms it seemed like her finger was fully healed.

I’m sorry there hasn’t been a Pearl update (or new photos). On Monday (when she was 1.5 days old) I tool Pearl in for her first checkup. The doctor was concerned with the way she was breathing and so we took her to Fairfax Hospital to get checked out.

Some day I’ll go into all the details but the short version of the story is that 10 nights later we got to come home (with a little oxygen and a pulse-ox monitor). The good news is that Pearl should be 100% in a couple of weeks and honestly has never been all that sick.

Anyway, here are some photos - a few from before the hospital and some from at the hospital. Click on the slideshow to get to the full album where you can see bigger versions of the pictures.

Pearl is doing great. B is doing well too. They’re both upstairs sleeping right now. It took Pearl a while last night before she got into a good rhythm for sleeping but she now seems to have the feel for it.

Coral stayed up kind of late but managed to get to sleep without much trouble. When I started reading her bedtime stories Pearl started to cry in the other room. I told Coral that it was okay, that babies sometimes cry. She said, “When Pearl cries it might wake me up… and I’ll never be able to get back to sleep!” Let’s hope that’s not the case.

I’m trying a few different things so I suggest you visit:

Pearl Rankin

The video below is also up on that new site but here is another copy of it. Enjoy!

Coral Meets Pearl from Andy Rankin on Vimeo.

More tomorrow.