Day 70: Not Much to Report

-
I don't have a whole lot to report tonight.  Gabe had another eye test and the doctor said he "did better than I could have possibly expected for a 23 weeker."  He's still got a few more tests over the next few weeks to make sure that his eyes are progressing as they should, but as of now, all is well.

Several people have asked me what needs to happen before we can get out of here.  Basically, there are three things.  Gabriel needs to be able to breath on his own, take all of his food by mouth and maintain his own temperature.  He's now breathing on his own, so we have one step down!  As soon as he hits 1800 grams (about 4lbs) they'll put him in an open crib rather than an incubator and we'll see how he does maintaining his own temperature.  Then all we have left is eating.  We've started letting him play around with it a bit, but he's still pretty little and it takes awhile to develop the coordination to suck, breath and swallow at the same time.  It may take a few more weeks before he's ready to do all three of those at the same time.  But we are getting closer!

I don't want to take him home until he's ready.  However, I'm ready to be done with this whole NICU thing and to take my baby home.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Easter Eggs and Cars

-
Image
My friend had surgery again, so her two kids are staying with us, which had been fun. It definitely has made our house fuller…and noisier… But they’re good kids and we’ve had a lot of fun. Monday we dyed Easter eggs. Josy ended up not participating, but the other three had a great time. Gabe was very proud of his special egg, where he painted the three crosses. The next day, Josy got to dye eggs with Cathy and Gabe missed out, so it all evened out. Also, Josy dyed eggs at school on Wednesday, so we have lot of eggs around here… Then the kids all made cars for Awana. Luckily I’d just gotten two very large Amazon boxes for a work project, and they worked perfectly. So we had several days of construction and lessons about knife skills. And now we have two very large cars taking up the majority of the living room… But they’re very proud of them and are having entirely too much fun with them.
Read more

A Very Cold Day

-
Image
We had another round of ski lessons yesterday. Unfortunately, it was cold. Very, very cold. Realistically it was just the wind chill. We would have been fine skiing in the teens, but the wind knocked it down and extra 15 degrees and that was too much. Pat and I took our gear, but decided it was way too cold, so we hung out in the lodge waiting for the boys.  A half hour into the lesson, I got a call from a friend that works up there that Josy was in the office. He’d made it a half hour before deciding that it was too cold to ski. So he hung out in the lodge with us. Gabe made it the whole time and didn’t want to quit to come inside. But Pat told him no and as soon as he came in, he realized that his fingers and ties were numb.  We ate lunch and then headed home. Hopefully the weather will be more pleasant next weekend…
Read more

A Car Wash

-
Image
Spring is finally here and it feels so good!! I mean, it still freezes overnight, which makes for sound very cold morning runs, but then it’s warm during the day. In fact, it was so warm, that Gabe wanted to run in the sprinkler. Pat had screwed the sprayer on so tight that I couldn’t get it off, which was the only reason he didn’t… Instead he decided to wash the car. I’m not going to say that the quality of the car wash was the best, but I will not complain about a kid wanting to wash my car. Yesterday there was a sports team doing a car wash fundraiser and I was going to take the car in, but Gabe was proud of his washing job, so we didn’t. I think my car is going to look like this for a while… Then we got dinner at the food trucks and headed home for a fire and s’mores.
Read more