9:30pm: Kristen had a nice long visit with Reid today and was able to be involved with a lot of his medical care. She was able to administer all of his medicines and change out the feeding tube that connects to his "button". Their goal is for us to get used to doing as much as possible knowing that we will be doing these things when we get home. If we are comfortable doing them in the hospital, we will most likely think nothing of it when we get home.

Speech therapy came by today to do an assessment and wanted to see if he had any oral aversions. They put a spoon is his mouth to see how he would react and he actually behaved how they expected him to. He moved it from side to side and "explored it". The next test was to see how many sucks he could have on a pacifier in a single sucking bursts. Normal babies get around 30 sucks, but Reid could only get about 7. Since it takes so much for him to breath in general, you can only imagine what it takes for him to breath and coordinate sucking at the same time. The last test was for the therapist to put some milk on her gloved finger and put it in his mouth. She moved it around, and while he tolerated it for a moment, as soon as she touched the roof of his mouth, he started to gag. It is obviously going to take some getting used to for him to have something other than his pacifier in his mouth, but they are hopeful that they can start some solid feeds within the next couple of weeks.

It gets a little frustrating when you think about how he compares to a full-term baby, but we are trying to focus on what matters... and that is that he is learning new things almost daily. Even an uneventful day in the NICU is a good day, and we are grateful that he is on the right track.

I will leave you with a few pictures that I have on my computer from the past few days (unfortunately, I dont have any Easter pictures with me).






5:30am: An early morning for me as I am heading off to DC for the week... well, until Thursday night anyway. I wanted to get something out here before I headed to the airport as it would probably be tonight before I will have another chance to get on here. Reid has been doing OK --- he had a rough time on Sunday evening and night and just seemed to cry and cry. When the nurse would pick him up, he could be consoled, but as soon as she would put him back down, he would start crying all over again. During the night when he was sleeping, he started de-satting and his O2 had to be turned up to 85. This is unusual due to the fact that he was sleeping, but probably shows that he had used up all of his "reserves" when he was crying for so long. A lot of activity and crying can wear him out. Yesterday, he seemed to be back close to normal and his O2 requirements had come down. He was still a little fussy, but not too bad. Physical Therapy was a little bit of chaos and when Kristen gave him a bath last night and he had nothing to do with it - but other than that, he seemed to have a pretty regular day full of smiles. His last weight (Sunday night) was 6.255 kg or 13.79 lbs. We are getting close to having a 14 pound baby!

Well, I need to run. Hopefully I will have more time tonight to get some pictures up here. Time is precious these days and we just don't seem to have much of it.