A day in the life

"The Lord said to him, 'Who has made man's mouth? Or who makes him mute or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?'"
Exodus 4: 11

Our day goes something like this. Tara gets up about 7 or 8 am to change and feed Laura. Soemtimes I get up with her, ussually I sleep through to the next feeding though. This is usually an hour long process that includes both breast and bottle feeding (for about 20 minutes total), with anything that is left from the bottle going through Laura's NG tube. Normally, Laura does not eat much at any of the morning feedings. Then, Tara will pump for 20 minutes. After that, there is the clean up of all the equipment. This process repeats itself every three hours, 8 times a day. I usually handle most of the duties for the othe 7 feedings, so I do not feel to bad abnout sleeping through this one.

This process can be a little frustrating for Tara and I, because Laura does not appear to be a morning person. She normally sleeps, or is only barely awake, through it all. Then in the late morning to early afternoon she wakes up. She eats more from the bottle which means she gets less in the NG tube.

This routine also means that Tara and I get less than 2 hours of sleep at a time. Which is not good for us. We are very tired. However, we are excited to see that Laura does not appear to be a morning person either. We hope that her current sleepy nature in the morning means she will let us sleep in later in life (unlike a good friend of ours and her family). The key word there is hope, since we have a long way to go yet.

Then, today we went in for a wiegh in for Laura, and Dr. Pielop asked us to alter our routine. He suggested that we only feed her 7 times a day, or every 4 hours. We got very excited because that means we will get closer to 3 hours of sleep at a time. That 1 extra hour at the time sounded so good to me that it was all I could do not to fall on my knees and kiss Dr. Pielops feet. We are very excited about this. The other good news is that Laura currently weighs 8 pounds 3 ounces. She has gained 3 ounces since last week. That translates to about 1/2 an ounce a day. Dr. Pielop was very pleased with this result.

We have also started a little game called tummy time with Laura. Basically, it goes this way. We put Laura on the floor (on a blanket) on her belly for a minute. This allows her to try to lift her head. It helps her work on her gross motor skills. If you do this once a day a new born will start to lift her head. Most babies will not like this the first few times you do it. They will figure it out though, so stay with it. Once the baby gets the hang of it you can go longer periods of time. The obvious long term results are that this exercise leads the baby to figuring out how to turn themselves over, push themselves up and even begin to work on sitting and standing. Today Laura was able to lift her head by herself for about 10 seconds. We are very excited about his.

If anyone knows of any other activites like this one, please feel free to mention them in the comment section. I will try to find a way to list all the exercises in one place on the blog so everyone can find them.

Later this week we have another meeting with Early Childhood Intervention to do an assment of Laura's capabilities, and to see what kind of therapy she will need. The results should be interesting.

We hope you had a great fourth weekend. I will tell you about ours in a later post.