The Journey Home

"It's your heart running around outside your body". ~ Steve Jobs, on having children

We had a good day yesterday. Genevieve ate really well out of the bottle for the nurses. She gets 50mls at every feeding and she did 5 great ones in a row, taking in 45, 35, 35, 25 and 50! We were so happy that she actually finished an entire feeding without the tube. It's wonderful progress! She's struggling a little more with breastfeeding, but we're making slow progress there too. We've gone from 6mls to 18 in the last 2 days with her.

We asked when babies like Genevieve usually come home from the NICU and the nurses told us they always tell parents they should be home by the time they were originally due. We're hoping she doesn't have to stay quite that long and we can bring her home before Christmas Eve. She is what they call a "Feeder/Grower". Once she gets the hang of eating on her own and gains weight twice in 48hrs, she'll be ready to come home. We're so grateful that she is otherwise a healthy baby and hope she decides that coming home is something she'd really like to do soon :).

She had some heart rate spikes over the weekend that were unexplained. So they did a round of blood work on her and it came back fine. They also did an EKG and Echo (Heart Ultrasound) and those looked good too. She has a small murmur, but the cardiologist told us that 4 out of 10 kids have them at birth. There is an extra artery that goes away and sometimes it causes there to be a slight pinch in the connection between the two remaining ones. It should be something that she outgrows and they very rarely have to do anything for it. She'll have another Echo at 9 months to check it out.

Spending every day at the NICU has it's challenges for us, but we love the time with our daughter. There isn't anything more important to us than her right now. We get up every day with her on our minds and go to bed each night the same way. There's more kisses and snuggles and I love you's between the three of us than we had ever imagined.

Evie's current stats are:
Weight: 4lbs 8oz
Height: 18 inches
Feeding Amount: 50mls per feeding (6 times a day)

Thank you all for your continued thoughts and prayers for our family, it means so much!