58 days

It's been a busy few days! I haven't had my laptop on me to post so let me catch you all up. First of all, baby Owen has brown hair just like Ava did when she was born. His fingers and feet are long just like Grant's were. Sometime I'll post a newborn picture of each of them and you can make your predictions:) I've only seen him open his eyes for the first time today, just briefly, and it looks like they are going to be blue. I can't tell you how awesome it was to see him looking up at me.

Let me fill you in on where we are medically. The doctors took Owen up to the NICU very shortly after he was born. Basically his systems are a little immature, as expected, so he needs some help to breathe & eat and to lower his bilirubin levels. When he was born we immediately saw he was able to breathe on his own!! But it was a lot of work for him so he took rapid, shallow breaths. The doctors tried to let him overcome that, but he was having trouble on his own so after about 12 hours they put on a CPAP. These were tubes in his nostrils that pushed air into his lungs, helping him keep them inflated. This made him much more comfortable. After about 48 hours they removed that and he was able to breathe just fine! Normally, in utero, it would take a baby until 40 weeks (full term) to make the ideal amount of surfacant needed in their lungs. It amazes me that when they are born preterm, in just 48 h their little bodies can make enough surfactant for them to breathe unaided. Our bodies are amazing. We are very thankful that Owen didn't need an invasive procedure like intubation or ventilation.

They gave Owen cool purple goggles & he was put under special lights to help clear his jaundice. He is currently eating through a feeding tube. Just today, since he is breathing well, they said we could try nursing. He's very uninterested right now, but should learn with a little patience. He really just wants to sleep and be left alone. I don't blame him, it was much more calm in the womb! So it's important that we don't overstimulate him. I have been doing Kangaroo Care where I hold him skin to skin for extended periods of time. It calms him down and is as close as we can get to giving him the environment he would have in the womb which is important for his brain to keep developing. And as he matures, he will become more alert and more interested in nursing.

Saturday night was a little rough for Owen. His veins are fragile and IV vein blew so they had to try a new one. They tried 9 times and finally gave up. Then they tried to go through his belly button but the IV curved and went toward his liver. There is only one vein in the belly button so they couldn't try again. They then resorted to a PICC line. The veins just blew so easily, but on the third time it worked. They did an X-ray to see if it was in the right place, but it was not. Honestly, he was tough. He cried the most when they wiped his skin with a cold wipe of all things. They left the PICC line in and in the morning a PICC nurse was able to adjust it so that the tube uncurled and went to the right place. So he didn't have to be stuck again! I was relieved about that. It's hard to see such a little baby go through all of that.

After talking to the Neonatologists, it seems Owen is doing extremely well. He just needs some time to catch up and adapt to being on the outside this early. So we are just being patient and living day by day.

Last night I was discharged from the hospital. Hooray, I'm not a patient anymore!!! It's a little bittersweet to leave my nurses:) I have promised to send them pictures. Apparently we've created a stir in the hospital. Yesterday the pediatrician asked if we were from the city and I told him we are from Detroit. He said "oh, you're the one who came to visit and has been here two months". He said he was very familiar with our story. And the housekeeper and cafeteria staff stopped by to see me and said they were going to tell everyone downstairs that I finally had the baby. Apparently they have all been wondering. Everyone is so surprised that I made it to 34 weeks!

Tonight Owen got a new roomate, a baby born at 28 weeks. Seeing that tiny little baby and the amount of intervention he needed, tugged at my heart. He is almost 1/3 the size of Owen. I just looked back and forth at him and Owen thinking, that could have been us. The nurses told me that some of those babies, born at 26-28 weeks celebrate their 1st birthdays in the hospital. What in the world would we have done in that situation? We are truly, truly blessed.