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As you may have guessed (or seen), the girls did come home on Wednesday, August 5th. We have been so excited to have them home!

“Click”-ish

They kept saying that it would “click,” and I guess this weekend was that time. Both girls had good days on Friday and were climbing. Their 24-hour numbers Saturday morning weren’t quite 80%, but they were heading the right direction. It wasn’t really overnight, but it did happen over a few short days

Out of the Cave

As our time in the NICU gets longer, we’ve started thinking a little longer term. Specifically, we were thinking about how the girls had never experienced sunlight. They’d both gone directly from the OR to their rooms in the NICU and never left. And those rooms are not near windows.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

We’re Back

There’s been some time since our last post. We’ve missed 36 weeks, 5 weeks old, and now 37 weeks. Changes have been fairly slow, so it just hasn’t seemed worth writing entire posts to keep up. As always, we’ll see how future posts go.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Month 1

We’ve officially made it to the one month mark as of today. It really doesn’t feel like it’s been that long.

Feeding

The big news here is that Elizabeth has taken a few bigger bottles. It was our wedding anniversary last night, so we saw the girls early and then went out for dinner. We called in later that night to check on something (see below) and the nurse informed us that she had taken 20 ml. I think her highest before that was maybe 11, but more like 9. I had to ask to make sure she was talking about Elizabeth, not Aspen.

Image by k-images from Pixabay

Bottles

I know I’ve been talking about bottles a lot, but it’s a big part of what we’re doing every day. Elizabeth is still going pretty slow, but we have to build up her muscles and get her familiar with how to go about it. The OT helped Sam with some steps to help her get the feel for it. A big part of that is tipping the bottle down at appropriate intervals to get milk out of the nipple. This is a “reminder” that she needs to breathe which helps her stay focused on the task instead of getting tired out.

Photo by Lucas Davies on Unsplash

More Bottles

First things first: Aspen is rocking the bottle! She’s taken her entire feed (52 ml) from the bottle from Sam our last two feeds. That’s amazing!

For Elizabeth, she continues to have bloody stools. They just won’t go away. We still haven’t stopped feeding her neocate, but it really needs to stop. However, we have started giving her a bottle with just a little formula in it with a very stiff nipple. We’re mostly working on the motions with her and she didn’t seem to like taking the binkie trainer.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Holidays!

Another nice surprise when we got in this morning. The nurses made us pictures for each of the girls!

Updates On Aspen

I put an update on Aspen in Split Nurses, just wanted to flesh it out a bit.

As I mentioned, she had a bloody stool. This was made more frustrating by how close she was to bottle feeding. She should get back to taking food instead of an IV this afternoon assuming all goes well.

When we showed up Tuesday they were just getting her IV put in. She complained very loudly about that but they seemed to get it in pretty easily. However, after she had settled down a bit, she had an apnic event. She basically stopped breathing at that point. Her O₂ levels dropped lower than I’ve seen so far. It was hard to watch and you could see the urgency that the nurses had stimulating her. She did come back, but it was probably the scariest event we’ve been witness to so far.