Friday

Not much going on today... He's doing well going up on his feedings. Sooo here's a bunch of pics...

Lots Going On!

So lets talk about yesterday first. I was holding the baby from 3-6. During that time he had a few desats, so when that happens, I usually change his position and that helps him. So during those few hours I had moved him around quiet a few times. I like to hold him cradled while he gets fed and is awake then once he falls asleep I move him to my chest so he can lay on his belly, which is easier for digestion for him. Anyways, about 15 minutes before it was time for him to go back to his nest, I take a look at his cute little face and notice something's missing. The tube that's supposed to be in his mouth, down his throat is no where to be found. I immediately FREAK OUT.  He has been known to pull these tubes out, but he was swaddled so I couldn't blame him. I start to panic and think that he has swallowed his tube, even though his vitals are perfect and there is basically no way he could possibly have swallowed that thing. I frantically unswaddle him to find the tube and wake Jon up as I'm freaking out. He is just looking at me like I'm a crazy lunatic (which I might be) and is laughing at me. We eventually find the tube which puts my mind at ease that he did not swallow it. So I must have yanked it out changing his position. Frankly, I'm surprised it took this long for that to happen.
Yesterday he lost 3 ounces, but this is attributed to the indocin he was on for his heart, which caused some fluid retention. So now he is getting rid of this extra fluid, which is a good thing

This morning however, I was told had he not lost so much weight, we could have gotten rid of the isolette and done an open air bassinet. So hopefully by this weekend!

So today he had a repeat echo to see if the indocin closed the PDA. It did! Praise God! His heart is beautiful according to the ultrasound tech, who has been doing this for 32 years. So I trust that. He does still have a murmur but its a normal baby murmur that he can grow out of. Or he can be like me and have one forever

After the echo, he had his first ever bath. It was soo fun. He seemed to like it. Didn't cry at all, he just kinda looked around and wiggled a little bit. So now we have a nice clean baby. I'm not gonna lie after 28 days he got a little stinky, especially behind his ears.

The eye doctor was next. Everything looks good. He has been titrated down to 1L of O2 on the nasal canula. 28 ccs of milk q3 hours.  He was pretty sleepy most of the afternoon due to having such a busy day, but not too busy to have some snuggle time with his mama!

uh oh I'm not sure whats going on here....I haven't been this nakey in awhile

we put him in the water swaddled so he can get used to the water..

nice and clean!

deep in thought

thanks Auntie Amanda for the cute hat!

Some Cool Stuff

So yesterday my midwife, Vanessa stopped by to check in on us. Vanessa is awesome, super amazing, I can't even say how much I love her. If you are having a baby, go see her she will take awesome care of you. Really all the midwives at the practice will, I'm just partial to her cause she was the one with me when all this Eli stuff went down. Anyway she is going to Ethiopia today for a conference for midwives, how cool is that! Pray for safe travels for her.

So that was one cool thing from yesterday next is this... If you have been keeping up with the blog you know that Jon's grandmother passed away last week. Well last night his cousin Kaitlin sent me this message on fb: 

Hey Annie,

I've been at my apt doing homework and I just got a letter from my grandma, hand delivered to me from the office staff. She wrote a sweet letter to me in her usual style, but she also slipped in an extra note about how she is keeping up with you and Jon's baby. I just wanted to let you know that she printed off every single entry from your blog up until October 26th and stapled them all together to send to me. Because she wanted everyone else in the family to be up to date on Eli's progress-his ups and downs. She probably told you that she loves that little guy, but just in case you didn't know how interested she was.... 😊 She probably took a second copy up to heaven to intercede for the baby, face to face with Jesus. Haha,  that would be just like her.

How cool is that!?!?! So awesome. Jon thought so too. He was so glad to get down to Florida to the funeral. He couldn't stop talking about how much he especially enjoyed getting to spend time with his cousins. But how neat for Kaitlin to get one more letter from her grandmother. I'm so glad she shared what happened with us. Ps Kaitlin is in nursing school and is gonna make a fabulous nurse! :)

So not too much going on today. Eli is sitting here with me while I type this. He just punched me in the chin with his tiny fist. Not nice Mr! He's squirming around a lot in his sleep, making his dolphin noises. He has gone from sounding like a mouse, to a kitten, to a dolphin. Just working on growing and breathing. Last night Jon and I had the task of putting a onsie on him. Which is a lot harder to do when two people are trying to get him dressed at the same time. He was very patient with us, didnt really cry but gave us some looks that I'm pretty sure we're saying ummm do you people know what you are doing here. Then after Jon left. we had a nasty neon green poop incident that required a whole new outfit and four diaper changes in about five minutes. I got a lot of the same looks then. 

"Good thing I shaved my chest this morning"

http://youtu.be/wxvWI2F8fjY

Kangaroo Care-You know it's legit when they talk about it on Grey's Anatomy...Jon and I were talking about this episode sometime last week(ya Jon watches Grey's too..his fave dr is Dr. Hunt).

Doing good today. Hanging out with daddy right now. Not too much to report today. The doctor said the most important thing we can do right now is skin to skin and give him breast milk. So that's what's going on. He's getting 26cc's of breast milk now. Having a little bit of a hard time of that..some spitting up but we're working on It. His forehead looks alright. All in all a good day.

He's Grown Out of Micro Premie Diapers!

Today was an interesting day. I walk in to the NICU and immediately run into the nurse that has been taking care of Eli during the day. She looks at me and says, "Oh Annie, did you hear what happened". So clearly I start to panic, but try to reason with myself that if something major happened they would have called me.  So I ask what...Now I called last night around 2:30 while I was up to pump just to see how he was doing. And in my half asleep confusion what I heard from the nurse was they had to move his IV site "near his head". I remember back to nursing school seeing a guy with a central line in his neck so this is what I assume is going on, and at 230 it makes total sense to me. As I'm walking in and this nurse is pretty upset about something, I realize how little sense that actually made and I probably heard wrong. So what happened was Eli's IV site which was in his foot had to be changed and there were no other IV sites left in his whole body except for his head. So they had to start the IV in the middle of his forehead.. This was fine until when they started his antibiotic. His IV infiltrated, basically that means that the catheter of the IV dislodged and the fluid that was supposed to go into his vein went into the tissue of his forehead instead. Luckily the nurse caught it pretty quickly stopped the IV and he got a shot to prevent any swelling. He has a nice area in the middle of his forehead that we have to keep an eye on to make sure the tissue doesn't turn necrotic. The nurse that was taking care of him last night was so upset that it happened, she waited until I showed up this morning to talk to me to explain everything that happened herself, which I think was pretty above an beyond. It's so awesome how much these nurses care about their patients. The good thing that happened from all this is that his nurse this morning talked to the doctor and asked if we could not re stick him seeing as he is doing so well with his feedings. Soooo baby is IV free!!! He also has been switched to only nasal canula, no CPAP. He's been doing great with the feedings, he's at 23 cc's every 3 hours. Breathing has been pretty good, some desats but overall doing well. He will get his eyes checked on Thursday, a repeat echo at the end of the week because his murmur is still present, and another brain scan at the beginning of next week.
This evening he had his nurse who we call  his girlfriend. She is so good and he loves her. She was saying how good he is doing tracking noises with his eyes and showing really good motor coordination because he can very easily get his fingers in his mouth. Both very advanced preemie activities. She switched his OG tube to now a NG tube. So the tube feeding him goes down his nose, which is better for him and its easier for him to suck on his binky. It's important to get him to suck on his binky while he gets his food so he can start to equate the sucking with getting a full belly. I might be able to start breastfeeding sometime next week!! I can not wait until I get up to feed a cute squishy baby and not to pump!!! He's starting to have more facial expressions too. Little smiles and smirks. I told him I loved him and he smiled and then I kissed him and he smiled again...it totally wasn't gas, I swear.

 baby burrito

His booboo looks worse than it actually is. It doesn't hurt him when you touch it. And already looks better this evening 

Weekend Update

Hi All! We had a good weekend, he's doing great. Here's what happened....

Friday his nurses decided that he was big enough to switch rooms. Basically he was in a room that didn't have any windows so it would be less stimulation. He also was in a room that was close to the nurses station so they could get to him fast if need be. Now that he's a big boy he can be in a room that has a window and a view(so we don't feel like we are in a dark cave when we are there all day with him) and he can be further away from the nurses station because he's more stable. He also transitioned from the micro premi leads for his heart monitor to just the regular premie leads annnd went up a hat size. So Friday was just Eli, Omie, and mama most of the day cause daddy flew down to FL to be with his family. Friday night while I was holding him, the nurse let me pick the Pandora station that was being piped into all the rooms, clearly I chose Backstreet Boys. So we rocked out to a lot of 90's pop, I'm sure I got judged a lot. On Friday he was still not getting any milk because he had to be off the indocin for 24hours before the resumed feedings. They just told me tonight that he screamed so loud because he was hungry friday night, that they could hear him all the way at the other end of the hall. Quiet a feat seeing as when he was born, you could barely hear him crying when you were sitting in the chair right next to the isolette. But still, after hearing this I felt so bad I started crying..poor hungry baby :(

Saturday we came in and found out he was having some instability with his temperature. He was ranging from 100.3 - 96.8. Not good for a baby who was maintaining his temp no problem for the last few days. On Saturday, his nurse was a new grad nurse who had just gotten off orientation. All the other nurses new that and though she seemed like a great nurse, they were in checking on her and the baby any time she was in the room. Which made me feel really good. One nurse got the doctor in the room as soon as she saw what was going on with the temperature and had them do an X-Ray of his belly and take a blood. Even though his vitals were fine, she says you never trust a baby in the NICU. I love our nurses they take such good care of him and us. And he has a few nurses that he knows their voices just like he knows ours. Anyway all of the tests came back negative and he started getting back his 15 cc's of milk at 430 last night. Omie and Grampa were there all day andddd Omie got to hold him. Omie has been taking such good care of me and him. Laundry, Food, slippers, taking pictures, basically everything making life a lot easier in general. Grampa too cooking breakfast, hanging with Eli, dishes. We are super blessed to have them in our lives. 

This morning Grampa made us yummy breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. Almost as good as Opa's. We went over to the hospital before church and daddy got some cuddle time. He was so alert, his eyes were open for almost 45 minutes. We could see him looking around and responding to our voices. The doc came in and decided he wanted a repeat abd xray before he increased the feedings, just to be sure everything was ok. He had a little bit of blood in his stool, but this is pretty common due to the tubes causing irritation. So the baby was squirmy when they took the xray and caused the xray to look like something was possibly a problem, so he had to have another xray to investigate. Jon and I went to church and Grampa held down the fort. Everything ended up fine, and he is up to 18 cc's of milk every three hours.  Yesterday he weighed 3lbs 15oz. We left before they weighed him today but he should be at the four pound mark. His murmur is still present, will have a repeat echo on Tuesday to see whats going on. But his vitals are great so we aren't super concerned.  Had an amazing dinner, thanks Cindy that cake was phenomenal!! 

And Im done blabing, now what you all really want to see....

new room

new isolette

old room 

he's really not angry all the time, its just the way his face is right now....

best.picture.ever.

 Chillin with daddy, getting some breakfast

snuggle time with Omie

Omie Grampa and Eli