A Christmas surprise, and the 3rd time's the charm!

Sunday, December 28

Faith has made quite a bit of progress in the past couple of days. I ended up actually going home Tuesday evening, so Dave and I could hang out with the boys and let my parents use the restaurant gift card we gave them for Christmas last year. It was strange to be home... it almost made all of this not feel real, since everything at our house was pretty much the same as it was when I left (just a little messier...). Dave, Noah, and I went to our home church for Christmas Eve, which was really nice. Calvary (the church we've gone to down here) is great, we feel really at home there, and so many of the people have been such a blessing to us, but I think Dave and I are both looking forward to getting back to our home church.

Maree called us Christmas Eve after church and told us Faith had pooped! She said it was small, but it was a big step in the right direction. Christmas morning we opened presents at my parents' house, ate, and then made our way back down here to the hospital to open Faith's presents. When we got here, Mary Ann told us that Faith had her biggest poop yet around 4:00!

Noah stayed down here with Dave and I Christmas night. That was interesting... Noah is a bed-hog... and Faith didn't have a very good night, she woke up pretty much every hour, so I was in and out of the bed a lot calming her down... I ended up sleeping in the recliner. We found out Friday that he's not actually supposed to spend the night here... no one had told us that, and it wasn't in any of the information the hospital gave us, and no one who mattered said anything to us about it, Mary Ann just sort of warned us not to let it get out that he'd stayed over. So, we took him back to my parents' house Friday night. He said one of the funniest things I've ever heard him say while we were there. Dave was on the couch with him, holding him and tickling him, and Noah was wanting to get down so he could play with the train, so he was saying "Get down" over and over again, and finally, he grabbed Dave with one hand on either side of Dave's face, and said, "Ok, listen. I wanna get down now!" He was so serious, there was no way Dave could ignore him! It was hilarious. Oh, and more big Noah news- he is working on using the potty! He can pee on the potty really well, and Friday night he pooped on the potty! We are just full of great poop news! :)
Friday they put Faith's NG tube to gravity. There was hardly anything coming out, and what was coming out looked mostly like spit, with a slight greenish tint to it. She spit up a lot on Friday though, so they ended up putting it back to suction in the night, thinking she wasn't really ready for it to be to gravity yet. It wasn't really the same as when she threw up before her last surgery though, it was more just reflux, because she would cough a few times, and then spit up after that. I brought up the fact that pretty much all she was spitting up was clear mucousy stuff, and that it seemed to me if I had a big huge tube down my throat, I'd probably be making more spit than normal, and have a harder time swallowing it. Maree thought that made sense, and so did Becky yesterday, and Becky was able to convince the surgeons to pull the tube! Faith has been SO much happier since that tube came out, even though she's still spitting up quite a bit. The surgeons had talked about feeding her yesterday, but that didn't end up happening. They did re-start her on Reglan, which hopefully will help getting stuff moving out in the right direction, instead of coming back up. And it should help with her reflux, too, in addition to the Zantac that they add into her TPN. She loves to sit in the bouncy seat she got for Christmas, between the position sitting a little more upright, and the vibrations, she is really comfy in it. And her bed is now set at as steep an incline as possible, to hopefully keep the reflux under control. In addition to losing the NG tube yesterday, Faith is now off of oxygen! Her oxygen saturations are great, in the mid to high 90's. Now the only thing that is actually attached to her and not just stuck on her skin is her Broviac line! Last night, she tried out the sling for the first time and she really enjoyed it! She loved the extra cuddle time with Mommy, and her heartrate dipped into the 120's for the first time really since surgery last Saturday. She liked the sling so much, and now that she only has the Broviac she is portable, so we took her for her first walk today, around the NICU. This is hard to see... I messed with the color to make it a little easier... this is Faith's monitor, showing her heart rate (the top number on the right) at 129 for the first time in over a week! (The middle number says 96, that is Faith's oxygen saturation in her blood, and the bottom number is her number of breaths per minute.)They started feeds today around 9 AM. They are just trophic feeds, 3 mL every 3 hours, but they're a start! This is the third time they've started feeds... hopefully this will be the time that it works out, and she gets to start increasing the amounts in the next couple of days. They did not put a new NG tube in to feed her, we have been giving her the milk either directly from the syringe, or using a nipple from one of her fancy bottles and putting the milk into that for her to suck out (click that link to see the cool bottles we got her). She has been spitting up quite a bit, but never after feeds, usually it's actually right before them. She and I had a talk this morning, and I explained how much work went into making the milk they're giving her, and told her that she shouldn't throw it up, she should keep it down... so she is. :) Since the spitting up doesn't seem to be related to the feeds, they haven't stopped feeding her, and hopefully they won't. I wish they would figure out why she is spitting up, so they could help her stop!

Daddy giving Faith's first (well, sort of...) feed! Daddy and Faith fall asleep together in the chair a lot...