At 13 days old, the boys are coming along well. The progress is steady and pretty good. As I’m a little behind on the blog entries, some of the details of Sunday are a bit of a blur.
We had a few key milestones on Sunday. For the first time, we were told that we were getting close to discharging the boys. The doctor on duty was quite pleased with Dexter’s progress and said that he was likely to be discharged either Tuesday or Wednesday depending on how consistently he ate his meals and that he continued to gain weight. Spencer was still a little behind and so it was looking like we were going to be taking Dexter to the local Hampton Inn for a day or two until Spencer was ready to be discharged. We’re currently staying in the Pediatric unit and the nurses reminded us that this was a ward with sick kids and we shouldn’t be exposing our newborns to that environment. We had brought supplies from home with us on Saturday for just this eventuality, but it still wasn’t going to be convenient. The logistics were going to be challenging and Barbara would probably have to stay in the hotel with Dexter while I shuttled back and forth to the hospital to care for Spencer and get us food, etc. But, we’ve learned to take one day at a time and cope with whatever happens. Now, this week is the local town’s biggest annual event, their street fair which is a large 5 day festival (Tuesday-Saturday). So, I called the local Hampton Inn to check on hotel availability if we needed to move there. Of course, they were booked Tuesday and Saturday nights (the first and last nights of the fair). It’s strange that this small town’s hotel is booked on back-to-back Tuesdays. Well, we just hoped that things would work out. If not, there were a few hotels slightly further out, just much less convenient. While talking with the desk clerk at the Hampton Inn, she informed me that there was a hospital rate for anyone visiting a relation in the hospital. It was $40 per night less. That was nice to hear. I mentioned that we hadn’t heard of that when we were there the previous week. She actually looked up our reservation and credited my credit card with the difference between the rate we paid and the discount rate. Wow! Good customer service. Although Barbara did point out that we had described our situation to the desk clerk the night we checked in and that clerk obviously did not know about the discount because she did not offer it to us. But, it was still really nice to get the refund. And $45 per night (after taxes) is a significant amount of money and can add up if you need multiple nights.
As for the boys, Dexter continued to become more consistent with his feedings. Although he had had many larger feedings meeting his current target amount (55 ml per feeding), he wasn’t doing it consistently. He’s eaten 50-55 ml of formula about 6 times out of 8 meals in a day. But the other two meals are generally about 35 ml. While there isn’t a daily quota, he needs to eat enough to ensure that he continues to gain weight, which fortunately he has been doing. Today he measured 6 lbs, 5.6 oz, or up 2.8 oz from yesterday. A good gain. Also, Dexter was stable enough for the hospital to do a car seat test. They put the baby into the car seat for 1.5 hours and watch the body monitors to ensure that the baby can handle sitting for extended periods of time in the car seat without a change in factors (such as heart rate, blood oxygen saturation level and blood pressure). In our case, because we live more than 1.5 hours away, they do the car seat test for 3 hours. Dexter passed.
Spencer’s big news is that while he has not matched his big 51 ml feeding from yesterday, he has increased the average amount he takes each feeding. Before today, he had averaged about 10-20 ml. Now, he averages about 30-35 ml per feeding. Big improvement. And he also continues to gain weight. Spencer weighed 6 lbs, 7.2 oz, up 1.3 oz from yesterday.
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