I put on my favorite pair of jeans last night, the ones I was so anxious to fit into again after my first pregnancy. I wish they didn't fit me now.

A neonatologist talked to me briefly today about what still needs to happen for Quinn to come home. This is a different doctor than the one who said he might go home without oxygen, so slightly different take on things. This doctor said we need to get CPR certified, and Quinn needs to have an apnea monitor to go home with, not so much for apnea, as to monitor his oxygen saturation. The doctor said all this would probably happen within a week. Of course, the other doctor said the same thing, but several days ago. The week was just shifted. As I've already mentioned, while it would be nice if Quinn came home unencumbered, I'll take what I can get in order to get started with the new normal of my life. And Quinn really is trying, but we're still asking super human things of him. A nurse told me the other day that Quinn has Wimpy White Male Syndrome. She said in her experience, white male preemies by and large need more support than any other preemie they see. While she was telling me this, she was feeding another baby, a girl barely weighing 4 lbs who was going home that day. She said when they get a baby like the one she held, they get excited knowing how well she'll do. She told me that baby's mother was Hispanic and her father was black. I responded that what she was describing was hybrid vigor, and not necessarily just being non-white. She looked confused, which sort of surprised me. I thought everyone knew what hybrid vigor was, but maybe that's just my bias from having studied it so thoroughly in school. I knew she was a dog person, and pointed out how much stronger and healthier mutts are than purebreds. Then she made the connection. Hybrid vigor applies to every organism that reproduces sexually. And it's evidently too bad that Kurt and I are so similar. Our kids got some shallow gene pools to pull from. Maybe I'll encourage them to think about outcrossing when the time comes.