Busy Day in Hospital

Today Nora and I had a busy day working on feeding.

The doctors in the NICU said when Nora was born to anticipate that she will be in the NICU until she is about full term - which would be sometime in January. Now that she is here, we have learned that the criteria for going home is depends on 1. Her ability to breath on her own, 2. Her ability to maintain her body temperature, and 3. Her ability to eat on her own and maintain weight.

She has been able to breath since the first day! There was a lot of worry about this since at 34 weeks the infants lung may or may not be fully developed. Nora came out and started breathing right away. She had a little bit of oxygen to help her out the first day, but less than I did!

She is getting better at holding her body temperature every day. She is kept in a little incubator called and "isolette." The temperature of her isolate today was about 83 degrees. She is able to maintain her temperature at a normal 98 degrees. They will continue to turn down the temperature until she is out of the isolette and can hold her temperature out in the open. Then she can wear regular clothes too.

Finally she needs to eat. I have fed her a couple of little bottles of breast milk. I have been pumping and the nurses have been feeding her breast milk too. She sucks it right down. We have tried twice to actually breastfeed and neither of us have it quite down yet. We are going to try again tomorrow. I am happy though, at least she know how to eat! The nurses say many premies just have probablems sucking and swallowing and she seems to be doing great.

So, I think she may be home sooner than we think, once we get to be feeding pros!