01/11/10

January 11, 2010 by Jen.

Today Juliana and I got to try something new and wonderful: breastfeeding! Although this can often be a challenging obstacle for preemies (and even for some full-term babies), Juliana seems to know exactly what to do, and she loved it! We are only going to try once a day for now because it really tires her out, but once she completely gets the hang of it, we will slowly increase to more feeds every day. In the meantime, she is receiving her milk through gavage feeds every 3 hours. She is still digesting it very well. We are so proud of her! It felt so wonderful to bond with her in this new way. I can’t wait until we can nurse for every feed, every day.

Juliana continues to do well on the nasal cannula. She is still on very low settings, but she occasionally needs her oxygen turned up at the end of her bolus feeds, because when her stomach is full, it presses up on her lungs and she desats for a few minutes. As she gets used to having a full tummy, this problem will go away. Even with her oxygen turned up, she is rarely over 30%, and most of the time she stays around 23%, basically room air.

Her length is measured every Sunday, and she was 40.5 cm last night. Today’s weight was 1780 grams, basically 3 lbs, 15 oz. She has nearly reached the 1800 gram mark which indicates that her body is ready to self-regulate its temperature, and she will be moved from her isolette into a crib. She’ll probably reach that milestone by the end of this week.

She was supposed to have her follow-up eye exam this morning, but the eye doctor canceled all of his Monday appointments. So, please pray that at her Tuesday morning exam he will find good results from the surgery.

Jason is at home working this week, so I’m in Baltimore by myself (although I’ve had some wonderful visitors to keep me company. Thanks Ansley, Alita, and Zach!), and I haven’t been able to keep up with the posts as well as Jason since he can post from his phone. However, I’ll still try to keep you all updated as often as I can. I appreciate that you, dear readers, are still so interested in our precious baby girl. Every day that goes by gives me more and more hope and excitement for the day when we can finally bring her home.

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