Friday June 27, 2008

I waited anxiously all day for Dr. Hiller to make the rounds and get to our girls; and of course, she had an incredibly busy day and didn’t make it to our girls until about 8pm. It is extremely unusual that it would be that late in the day, but since our girls are no longer the sickest babies in the NICU, we are the last on the list – which we are pretty ok with…except today. Today was supposed to be the day that the girls and I got to start practicing nursing. I say practicing because we didn’t really expect them to get much nutritional value out of it. So, I went over to the NICU a little bit before every feeding time (every 3 hours) to see if Dr. Hiller had written the order, but no luck until 8 pm. At 8pm though, I finally got to swaddle up Evie and see how she would do. She figured out the first part, but only got a little trial before she started to de-saturate. I blame the removal of her OG tube and getting stuff stuck in her throat – or maybe she just hadn’t figured out how to swallow yet. Thus, we put her back to bed and fed her the “normal” way. Evie had a good first shot at it, and when she gets her breathing a bit more efficient, she’ll be able to try a little bit longer.

We had a bit higher hopes for Maggie, because she has been showing more interest in sucking. When I was trying to change her diaper, she even started sucking on my knuckle – hungry girl. And we were right, Maggie was excited to get to try out something new and did very well. She stayed out for much longer and had intermittent periods of sucking and then fell asleep in Mom’s arms. Thus, Maggie’s first trial was very successful. We get to try nursing once a day with each of the girls – since it is quite a tiresome feat.

Maggie got a new bed today because her heater wasn’t working quite right. Of course this bed exchange was happening while there were all kinds of activity in the NICU and we had brought Colleen Meyer in to visit the girls. Otherwise, they’re still feeding and growing!