Hands and Feet

The final night that Alisha and I spent with Roscoe, the nurses arranged to do molds of his hands and feet. Since things came suddenly, they didn't have time to fully prepare so things were a little improvised. They partially filled an aluminum pie pan with dental alginate. While I held Roscoe sitting upright, we put his feet into the dental alginate while it was still wet. We held them there until the alginate hardened, then removed them and repeated with his hands. This left a detailed impression, like you'd see if someone put their hands into wet concrete.

The nurses then poured plaster into the hand and feet impressions to fill the rest of the pie pans. The result was a 3D mold of his hands and feet with very specific detail:

The detail of the wrinkles on his hands is astounding

You can even see a circular band-aid they had on his wrist

This foot pushed against the bottom of the pie pan

By the time we pushed this foot in, the dental alginate had already started to harden

I mentioned in the last blog post that there was a surprise waiting for us at UCSF when we returned earlier this week. The surprise was that I'd asked the staff at UCSF to do a second mold of his hands and feet. I did this because we were terrified about these first molds breaking. As you may have noticed above, his thumb broke while the plaster was not yet fully dry (we plan to glue it).

When we arrived at UCSF, we met some of the nurses and staff we had spent the most time with and they brought these new molds into the room for us. We loved the different angle, more complete view of his hands, and the ability to hold his feet:

Tomorrow I hope to update the blog with some pictures we took at the Disney museum. The update will come later in the day, since we have an appointment in the morning to speak with a nutritionist about any possible nutritional tools we could use to avoid IUGR / prematurity issues with future pregnancies.

For any moms who'd like to do something like this for your children, you can buy dental alginate and plaster online. It would be a fun craft project! Here's a link to how to do it.