moved

Lots of moving yesterday! Brecken's x-ray came back perfect- no more air bubble around his chest at all. That's great news! At 5:00, he got moved to the Infant Care Center, where the healthier babies are. We're relieved about that. The nurses here are fantastic. As soon as a beep goes off on a baby's monitor, they are right there finding out what is wrong. He finally got the hang of eating last night about 9:00. We figured out that he will not wake up enough to eat unless we change his diaper and get some cold air moving down there. Then he'll wake up enough to chug his bottle instead of take an hour to get half of it down!

Josh and I also moved yesterday. A room at the Ronald McDonald house opened up so we moved over there. It's right across the street from the hospital. It's lots different than I pictured it, it's much like a hotel. Our room is big, it has 2 double beds, a tv, a nice dresser and mirror, and it's own bathroom. Hooray! No more walking down a long hallway to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night! :) And it's really cheap which is nice, only $15 a day and we get to stay there until Brecken comes home. The sleep room at the hospital was a day-by-day thing, we never knew if we could have it the next night. So the assurance that we have somewhere to stay for sure is nice.

This morning we got to the hospital and the nurse asked if I wanted to start nursing. Of course I did! It's quite a process, we have to change his diaper, then turn off his monitors for a few minutes, then unhook all his tubes, then put him on a scale to see how much he weighed at that moment, then hook everything up, then he can be passed over to me. He latched on right away but doesn't have much interest in eating at this time. He likes snuggling much more. He's a great snuggler. After eating, we're supposed to weigh him again to see how much he ate, but he hasn't eaten enough to ever bother weighing him again. So he gets fed in his tube. I asked why we can't do the rest in his bottle to practice sucking and the nurse said it takes too much energy to nurse and take a bottle and he needs to conserve energy. That makes sense. So his next feeding, we'll do a bottle instead to make sure he can maintain eating that way. It's all my milk so it really doesn't matter how he gets it.

The doctor came to visit him today and he said Brecken is doing great and he hopes we can go home by the middle of next week. Brecken will probably go home on oxygen, but we can deal with that. He has to keep getting his oxygen lowered (which is going really well, he's maintaining 100% oxygen levels in his body and his intake gets turned down every hour!) and prove that he can be OK if he pulls out his oxygen tube from his nose in the middle of the night when we can't notice it, and he has to get his feedings up. Then we can go home. Right now, we're increasing his feedings by 4 ml every 3 hours. His last feeding we were at 17 ml, and we have an ending goal of 40 ml. Hopefully that won't take too long!

The family with the baby next to us in the NICU has a rough day today. They are taking the baby off his life support today. He was born on Wednesday and never got any better. Josh had talked to the dad a little bit. Keep that family in your thoughts since they had such a rough day today. That's any parent's nightmare and I can't imagine having to make that decision.

So that's the update for today- we'll keep you posted in what happens!