So Sunday morning, we slept in, had breakfast in the room and got over to the boys for the first visit of the day at 12:30 pm. We were welcomed with great news. Spencer's breathing had been so stable that they had finally taken him off of all oxygen support and he was breathing on his own! Yeah, finally. This was such wonderful news. Also, Spencer's daily intake of formula was steadily going up. He had been increased to 26 ml and they continue to increase him 6 ml every 12 hours. When he gets to 56 ml, they'll take him off of the IV feed and he'll have even fewer wires and tubes in him. At one point just after the surfactant was administered, he had so many wires and tubes, it looked like the Borg queen from the Star Trek movie. :-( But the majority of them have been removed and over the next couple of days, hopefully more will continue to be removed.
Dexter remained much the same, but he was getting more stable every day except for the feeding. One of the real signs of progress is that babies have to regulate their own body temperature. They are placed in the incubators and the temperature is slowly reduced. As long as they can keep their body temperature around 37 degrees C (close to the 98.6 F that we're used to), then they reduce the temperature slowly. If their temp drops below 36.5, the bed stops the temp change or turns it back up a little. When the bed temp reaches 28 C and the baby can still maintain a 37 C body temp, they can be moved from the incubator into a crib. This is one of those milestones. Dexter is down to about 30-30.5 C. Spencer is still at about 33.5 C.
Apparently at the 10:30 AM feeding, they tried to feed Spencer by bottle, but he acted like Dexter. He kind of looked like "What am I supposed to do with this?" We had hoped that since he was so avidly into sucking on the pacifier (it really calms him down) that he'd take to the bottle, but it will take him a little time to get to that, just like Dexter. The staff said that they'd try him once per nurse's shift to keep testing him.
Well, since we were taking off Dexter's 3:30 feeding to let him rest, we decided to take a walk. We had been told to try this little local sandwich cafe down the street from the hospital. We walked down that way, but it was closed on a Sunday. So we kept walking. We finally stopped at a Pizza Hut and decided that we needed to eat then and get back to the hospital. But it was a nice walk out in the sun. What a nice change of weather from the stormy weather from the previous week.
We decided not to visit for the mid-afternoon visit. Barbara caught up on some e-mail and work that she needed to do and Ted rested with a book.
When we went back for the 6:30/7:30 visit, Spencer needed a bath. But neither of us has ever bathed an infant, so this was our chance to learn. We got to watch and learn how to bathe Spencer. The nurse decided that since Spencer was still connected to IV's through his umbilical cord that it was safer for her to bathe him and we could bathe Dexter tomorrow. We definitely agreed and watched and learned how to bathe our children.
While we were in with the boys, it started to storm pretty badly including thunder and lightning. We were very grateful that we had planned on having our leftovers for dinner so that we wouldn't have to leave the hospital in the storm to try and find dinner.
At night, they weighed the boys. Both were gaining weight. Dexter was 5 lbs, 10.3 oz (0.5 oz higher than yesterdays 5 lbs, 9.8 oz). Spencer was 6 lbs, 5.9 oz, up as well, but I don't remember what yesterday's weight was. Dexter was leveled at 50 ml of formula per feeding and Spencer was up to 32 ml of formula for feeding.
Every day, they take little baby steps forward, but they’re getting stronger every day.
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