Two Months

It's the boys' two month birthday today -- can you believe it? (They're also the ones who have been in Pod F the longest. Yep, we're the old-timers! Another baby who was there when we arrived is still in the NICU, but moved to a different pod.)

We don't know yet what the next step will be for Jamesie -- the radiologists and surgeons have to confer, and they haven't had a chance to do that as of this evening. But the doctor seems pretty sure that it will be surgery. If there really is an obstruction in the bowels, that's the only way to treat it. (However, apparently the fact that James pooped last night hadn't really been brought to the team's attention, so who knows if that will change anything -- probably not, but a mama can hope! The nurse who had him last night had only had him once before, about a month or so ago, so I don't think she realized that the pooping was kind of a big deal. The doctor did say that usually the contrast material just goes around poop, though, so it's unlikely that it alone was causing the obstruction. And as far as we know he hasn't pooped again since last night. So, probably I'm making more out of that one event than it deserves.)

He was doing fine today, though they did put him back on his cannula in the afternoon. Most likely he was still just a little tired after all the commotion yesterday.

We were there when the speech person was feeding Mattie, and it was really informative. It seems like the main issue for him is keeping his concentration and pacing his feeding and breathing. (He has a tendency to breathe too fast, which makes it more difficult to coordinate the swallowing part.) This is mainly a function of immaturity; he'll get better at these things as he grows, but in the meantime they want to encourage good habits rather than bad ones. For us, that means paying close attention to the cues he's giving about whether he's ready to eat at that particular moment or not. Ideally, he should be in a calm, alert state. She showed us what kinds of cues he gives when he's stressed out (raising eyebrows, twitching) -- and said he's a very good communicator. :) That way we can give him a break when he needs it. (She told us that the old approach was to just feed babies whether they acted interested in it or not, but that the new research shows that following the baby's lead makes for faster progress, and avoids problems like feeding aversion, where they start refusing bottles altogether because they have negative associations with eating.)

When we were talking to the doctor, he said that he thought it was possible that Mattie would be ready to go home in a week. Wow! I suspect this is an overly optimistic estimate and I'm certainly not going to count on it, but it was kind of a wake up call that we need to really start getting things ready at home. We're not too far from being ready -- for instance, we have a crib but haven't assembled it; we have some diapers but no wipes -- but we definitely still have some work to do! And it's hard for us to imagine being regular parents instead of NICU parents. (Literally hard to imagine -- it's a whole new world!) We've got the NICU routine down pretty well, but being in charge of our babies full time is going to be another huge transition. And I can't speak for Mike, but it's one I haven't let myself think about very much. Even now I'm scared of getting my hopes up too much. But at the same time we're starting to look forward to having them at home.

[Top two pictures are Matthew, bottom one is James.]