We've been taking so many pictures as the days goes by, that I wanted to do another poll. You know, the one that I said we would do weekly, but have only done once? Oh, well. :) The winning picture gets to take over the header of the blog. Vote to the right by the end of Wednesday!
Jon and I spent the afternoon at the hospital today. Ethan is doing great, which I don't get tired of reporting. He is up to full feeds as of today! 30ml or 1 full ounce. Although, he's hit a wall on weight gain to our frustration. He's still at 3lbs 11oz after 3 days. Ugh! It's so frustrating. We are (un)patiently waiting for that golden 4lb mark.
Tracy, our primary nurse, made the off hand comment yesterday before leaving for her weekend: "Just think, he'll hit 4lbs and after that, all he needs to do is show us he can handle eating on his own and he's out of here." It made my heart almost stop. I know it's not as easy as all that: he needs to regulate his body temperature (which he seems to handle really well even before 4lbs) and stop the Brady's for 5 days straight. Although the Brady episodes are a lot less, he still seems to have 1 or 2 per day. Mostly, when he is trying to poop. Apparently pooping is tough business. He scared the hell out of me yesterday. I was feeding him and all of a sudden, his alarm bells went off out of nowhere. Two nurses were next to me within seconds. I realized he was in the middle of one of these Brady's. The next second, we all heard a loud, vibrating noise coming from his diaper and his face was all red. Like I said, pooping is hard work. Hopefully he'll get the hang of it soon :)
And lastly, like Tracy says, he needs to learn how to eat. He is still feeding through the gavage running through his nose. Although he hit 34 weeks yesterday (yes, only 34 weeks), his respiratory rate is still running slightly high, so they haven't given me the chance to try feeding him by mouth. Hopefully, I'll be able to report that we tried this in the next couple of days and we can start moving towards a go home date!! Ok, I gotta stop, I'm getting ahead of myself.
It's still all good news though and we just have to be patient... it's only a matter of time now. Whether it's 2 weeks or 4 weeks will depend on Ethan. Until that happens, we have some fun things to look forward to this week:
1) hitting 4lbs!
2) bassinet time
3) we get to give him a real bath in a tub for the first time :)
and
4) hopefully, feeding by mouth
Keep him in your thoughts and pray that this week, we'll hit all of the above milestones.
I wanted to send out a thank you to everyone for the fun comments you are leaving. It's so great to know that you are all out there reading and thinking about Ethan and we love reading them! Hopefully we'll be able to keep the good news coming!!
PS..check out the videos that are posted below the poll. They're small and Ethan isn't doing much...just showing off what he does best....looking freakin' adorable.
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