Wednesday, September 14, 2011

W2.D3 Getting the Hang of It

Well, we had hoped to be home with the boys by today.  Our original estimate had this as the day that my parents were going to come to visit.  But by last Thursday, we knew that this was no longer reasonable.  I had purchased tickets for my parents to come up to stay with us, and this past weekend, I had to call Southwest Airlines to try and adjust their flights.  When I explained the situation to the airlines, the customer service agent was very sympathetic and canceled my parents’ flights and gave us full credit for their tickets with no cancellation penalty.  I was stunned.  What airline these days doesn’t charge you a penalty for changing/canceling a flight?  But she put a credit into the system under each of their names for which we can just apply those funds to the tickets when we can actually schedule their visit.  MAJOR kudos to Southwest Airlines for their great customer service.  We are already devoted Southwest Airlines fans and pretty much will only fly SWA.  This just makes us bigger fans.

So, we went back to the Pennsylvanian breakfast joint and they were hopping.  Amazing what good homemade home cooking can do.  They had homemade sausage that they make themselves that was out of this world.  We also tried something we had never heard of before that turned out to be incredibly good—baked oatmeal.   It doesn’t sound that appetizing,  but it’s pretty good.  Imagine oatmeal seasoned just right and cooked into basically a quick bread (like a banana bread) and served with a little brown sugar and milk.  Wow…it was good.  I suspect my mother-in-law will love it and have to look for a recipe to try this out for when she comes to visit her new grandchildren.

Once again (this is becoming habit), we showed up at 12:30 to find good news about the boys.  Now one reason that we tend to keep the schedule that we keep is that the doctors come in every morning around 9:00 AM and evaluate all the NICU babies and decide on changes.  Then the staff bustle around putting those new orders into place.  The NICU is very busy in the mornings and sometimes hectic and chaotic and it’s much easier on the hospital staff not to have parents visiting then.  This is why we often have good news when we finally show up at lunch time .  So, today, we found that they were so pleased with Spencer’s condition that they had removed his IV’s.  He was no longer on any supplemental IV nutrition and was getting all of his nutrition from the formula feeding.  Yeah!  Now, he was down to only the monitoring cables and the feeding tube, essentially just like Dexter.  Another step forward.  Additionally, Dexter was getting better at regulating his body temperature and the environmental settings on his isolette bed was down to 29.5 C.  Getting closer every day.   The doctors have also decided that Spencer was stable enough that we should try bottle feeding him anytime that he was wide awake and alert at feeding time rather than only once per nurse’s shift.  And the doctors are just a please with his progress as we are.

So today, both boys needed baths.  They give each baby a bath every 3 days, but Dexter had only gone 2 days but you could definitely smell that he needed a bath.  So, we again scheduled the baths for between the boys bottle feedings, e.g. 3:30/4:30 PM.   We both gave Dexter his bath and then I sat down to hold Dexter and give him his NG feeding while Barbara bathed Spencer all by herself.  She did a great job of it.  

However, he was definitely not ready to bottle feed so we left it at that.  We got a little rest including Barbara getting a very short nap and then went back for the 6:30/7:30 feeding.  Unfortunately, the bath had worn out the boys.  They don’t like getting a bath, so they squall using up energy.  Additionally, while they are getting their bath (essentially a sponge bath), between sponging and drying, they expend a lot of energy keeping their body temperature at a reasonable level.  It still chills them down and even once they are back in the incubators, it takes a while before they come back up to 37 C.  They both fall right to sleep after a bath (hopefully we’ll be able to use this to help set a night time routine for them when they’re slightly older).  But even a couple of hours later, they still were pretty tired and so didn’t feed themselves too well at 6:30/7:30.  Dexter took about 14 ml of formula and Spencer only about 5 ml.  Oh well, we’ll see what it’s like later.  It was very nice when one of the nurses who had helped us several times over the last couple of weeks commented that we were really getting the hang of the baby care and that she thought that we were going to be able to manage quite well on our own. 

We were exhausted so we went out for dinner, then came back and we skipped the 9;30/10:30 feedings.  Barbara got to bed early and Ted caught up on the backlog of blog entries (including this very one). 
So, looking forward, this Saturday is our local Mother’s of Multiples club fall consignment sale.  After this last week and a half, we know a lot more of the supplies and such that we’ll need to take care of the boys.  So, on Friday, we’re going to shift our schedule and go to the 9:30/10:30 AM feedings through the 3:30/4:30 PM feedings.  Then we’re going to get in the car and head home.  We’ll check on the house, unpack and repack different clothes, etc and get ourselves ready to return.  On Saturday morning, we’ll go to the sale from 7:15-8:00 which is the members-only shopping period.  Then there is open shopping from 8:00-11:30.  They close from 11:30-12:00 when they relabel items and reopen from 12:00-1:00 when select remaining items are half price.  We’ll shop, bring out finds home then come back up here for the 6:30-7:30 feedings.  It will be a nice break, a chance to check on the house and to sleep in our own bed.

I went to the 12:30/1:30 AM feeding for the boys and was regaled with an amusing (after the fact) story.  Apparently, Spencer was getting changed at 10:30 when he let lose with the mother of all explosive bursts.  There is a small porthole on the end of the isolette which is normally used to thread various cables through.  When not in use, they put the latex cover over it, but since Spencer had until just yesterday had a lot of IV and such tubes going through, they had not yet covered it up.  Well, Spencer managed to not only give the explosive burst which covered the inside of his isolette, but he got right out through that porthole and covered the wall outside the bed.  The wall with all of the NICU equipment such as oxygen, the humidifier, etc.  The nurse who was about to get off shift at 11:00 got to spend almost an hour cleaning everything.  While I feel bad for the nurse (she’s a really nice one, too), I was so glad that we were not there for this big event in our son’s developing childhood.  I’m sure he’ll give us many memories of our own, but I’m glad that he spared us this one.   So, despite Barbara having given him a great bath, he was really in need of a second bath and ended up with two baths in one day. 

So, Dexter did good.  He weighed in at 5 lbs, 14.4 oz which means that he has passed his birth weight (which was actually 5 lbs, 13.8 oz).  Hooray!  And he also drank 17 ml for me before giving up and having the remainder fed.  He’s still keeping to the 11-25 ml range for feeding on his own…hopefully in the next few days, he’ll increase that.  Spencer weighed in at 6 lbs, 3.8 oz (6 lbs 4.4 oz right after his explosive burst) so he’s still over birth weight and is about 2.2 oz above two nights ago, which seems about right.  My guess is that different nurses are doing something different to get these numbers.  Spencer was pretty tired after two baths and the excitement that he had created, so he once again acted like “What is this thing in my mouth?” and didn’t drink on his own, but then we weren’t too surprised.  Ah well, two steps forward, one step back.  He’s still made huge progress over the last week.

No comments:

Post a Comment