And the cords come off…

Look at the beautiful baby! Nice and content after eating like a champion. He decided enough with the feeding tube coming out his nose, and took it out himself this afternoon. Since he’s going to start having bottles at night when I’m not there. Unless he absolutely refuses the bottles tonight, it’s not going back in.

Here’s him studying his daddy’s face. He was a little sleepy, but kept his eyes open as best he could.

He spent most of the day today under lights for jaundice. He was pretty much chillin’ like this for most of the time. I tell ya, life ain’t so bad after all. Doesn’t he look good here? He lost some weight after birth, of course, so he was 6lbs 4 oz this morning. He’s going to have to start going positive as far as the weight gain before he gets home.

Here’s his whole bed under his lamps.

Today brought about a bunch of changes, as the catheter in his belly was removed. His feeding tube, as I mentioned, was removed. He has no more tubes in him. There are 4 monitors connected to him watching his heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature, and of course respiration.

With so many things going on, we’ve been so anxious to get him home, and all of the NICU rules have been making it difficult to establishing feeding. They’re on a 3 hour schedule, where I can nurse him every 3 hours. So I try to nurse him on time, but if he’s tired, it takes some time to get him going. If he’s not eating after 20 minutes, the nurses just supplemented into his feeding tube. He needs to be burped quite often during the feeding, but every time I burp him, my patting sets off his heartbeat monitor, and alarms start going off. Every time I moved him into a better position, alarms went off. Cords get tangled, alarms went off. For awhile, it felt like everytime I touched him, alarms went off. Needless to say, it has been a frustration to me.

So today, I was talking to the nurse in charge of his discharge from the hospital. I was telling her that I didn’t know how to establish feeding under these circumstances, so she called a meeting with her, Elias’ doctor, care nurse, lactation consultant and myself. We sat down and came up with a new plan on feeding Elias, which I’m very excited about. Instead of feeding every 3 hours with only 20 minutes to get him to latch on, we’re feeding him based on his cues, every 2-4 hours. (They gave me a pager so I can go and eat move about the hospital and come back when I need to.)

He’s moving to bottles at night, with breastmilk fortified with extra calaries. Feeding on cues completely changed how he ate today…which was fantastic. Instead of eating for 3 minutes, and then falling asleep and needing supplements in his feeding tube he now eats for 30 minutes consistently, or over 50 minutes with taking cat naps throughout. I’m excited to see if he’ll gain weight faster this way. At least I think after he uses bottles tonight, we’ll be able to check off “establish feeding” off the list. Then all that’s left is weight gain! Yeah! I can’t tell you how badly we want to all be home again! I miss my other kids! By the way, they’re coming to visit tomorrow. I’m so excited!