Bottle Time!

Saturday has been a great day for baby Stella, and for us. Our wonderful friends and family gave us an awesome baby shower filled with much-needed things!! Thank you, thank you to all who came!!! We are so fortunate to have you in our lives and support us through this time!

Now to baby Stella, first she did have a heart rate drop yesterday, friday, at 10:50 am but that has been her last as of right now, remember 4 days after her last heart rate drop they start a countdown home so we are very prayful that this was her last one. Last night and today we were able to watch her being fed with a bottle!! We can't do this yet because she is just learning, once she gets the hang of it we will be able to feed her. She is able to get 2 a day only right now because fear of her burning off to many calories. So she typically has one in the morning and one at night and her other feedings are through the feeding tube, which is now down her nose to her stomach. Friday she took about half of both bottles in 20 minutes, which is about 15 cc's. Jared and I were nervous because yesterday we thought....this could be a really long process of her catching on but today we were amazed!! At her 5:30 bottle feeding she took all 33 cc's out of the bottle in 10 minutes!!! We couldn't believe the progress that had happened overnight! Of course this can only be explained by God's mighty hand. So bottle feedings are moving right along! We are anxious to watch her again tomorrow, it was very exciting to see our baby eating on her own! Probably starting Monday they will give her 3 bottles a day and then so on throughout the week until as last all her feedings are by bottle, this is also the only way she can go home as well. She is tolerating the feedings so good, and keeping all the formula down so we are thinking she is really hungry and ready to be home too! Her jaundice count is still normal so the lights are still out. Her weight is slowly BUT surely going up, she now weighs 3 pds 14.6 ounces. And really I told Jared tonight, just that little bit of gain is starting to fill out her face. We really hope by Monday she can be close to if not 4 pds!! She is still breathing just fine on her own and oxygen levels are staying just how they should! Other than that all she is doing right now is eating and sleeping, just what she should be doing the nurses say!

On a side note, we heard some nurses talking today about an NICU party and we said, wait they really have that? And the nurse said that every Christmas they have an NICU party for the babies that have been there the past year and they invite them back so the nurses can see them and see how they have been doing and growing. We thought this was major cool. You really do get attached to these wonderful nurses who take care of your baby everyday. So needless to say, we are super pumped about the party and can't wait to show off God's creation and miracle at the Christmas NICU 2009 party!!!

We posted pictures of the shower and big sister, and the bottle feeding and Stella trying to burb!!! (which she did by the way)

Love-Kristen

Happy 1 week Birthday!!!!

God is in control....the motto for Stella's first week of life. This is Kristen, I have decided to write the blog tonight. I don't feel deserving of all the prayers going up for baby Stella. She is just such a little miracle of life and God's awesome work.....the Ultimate Physician. She just continues to get better, she is up to 31cc's for her feedings, which take place every 3 hours. She has a feeding tube for right now, but soon she will switch to a bottle, which we are told could pose some problems since she hasn't learned to suck on a bottle and then swallow the formula, all while breathing. All she knows right now is that she is getting satisfied. So this we are told will be the next step. She has not had a heart rate drop since yesterday at 2:10pm! Praise God. This is such good news, she will still recieve the caffiene shot until she can keep going without the drops for a few more days. The IV in her head came out today, which hopefully she won't need another one. They won't start another one, unless she needs one. The jaundice light is completely out, her count was normal again today so she will no longer have to sit under that. The last issue that is concerning is her weight. She is down to 3 pds 10.9 ounces. The weight does take a while to put on so please be in prayer that she starts to gain (why can't this be my problem?). She is just 35 weeks, but she seems to be at a stand still on the weight so we really want to get those lbs on her. The incubation unit should also help this, it might just be a slow process.

I got to change her diaper today for the first time and have never been so nervous. Her legs are like twigs that you think one wrong move could make them snap in half. Her hinny is literally as big as setting two quarters next to each other, the preemie diapers are huge but they do the job and needless to say I actually felt like her mom being able to change her diaper finally! So who knew changing a diaper would feel so good?? She is also wearing gowns so we are posting pictures of her with some clothes!!

Again, I can't express how thankful we are for your prayers, love, support and concern. We are so blessed by all who care and continue to check on our family. We thank God everytime we pray. This life is filled with hard times, but its so much easier to go through with support. I hope that we are doing a good job keeping the updates and I hope you see how your prayers and our God is healing my daughter. Truly from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Happy 1 week Birthday my precious baby Stella!

Lights out...

The jaundice lights are out, which is another big step towards getting better. Stella had another good day....she is up to 25cc's of formula and should be up to 29cc's after the night is over. That is almost 1 ounce of formula every 3 hours. She also had her nasal oxygen tube removed, which means we can see more of her precious face. They told us that when her IV goes bad next it will not be put back in, but they didn't want to remove a good IV until it went bad. So whenever that happens she will only have a few monitoring wires left on her. Today she seemed much more alert. Kristen got to comb her hair after her wipe down and also put baby lotion on her. The next thing that we need to make progress on is her heart rate drops. She is still having at least 1 heart rate drop every 24 hours. Once she can go several days without having one, then we will be on an 11 day countdown as I had mentioned in a previous post. We got to put her in a gown before we left her tonight. I will post pictures of those sometime Thursday. We appreciate all of the prayers which have helped us be strong in this tough time.

Jared

It's getting better everyday

Okay, so today has been a fabulous day of improvement for our baby Stella (mom is doing better emotionally today as well). First, let me start off with her jaundice count which went down a whole point today, so they turned off 3 of the bulbs that were on her down to 1 bulb. Tommorow if her count is even less and is normal than they will turn the lights off completely....which means her sunglasses come off....which means we can finally look at her whole face and start trying to figure out who she looks like!!! Second, they moved her to an incubation unit, which we haven't got to see her in yet because they did that tonight but its a clear casing over her whole body, we are told this is a graduation step up from the open bed. The incubation unit is much warmer and quiet and they tend to burn less calories while they are in it and we want her keeping in all nessecary calories! The next step after the incubation unit is a baby crib that the "on-time" newborns use so we are half way there! Stella's feedings have been upped for in the morning to 18 cc's considering she does well tonight and the Dr. has told us that she is keeping her food down very well for her weight. So this is great news, the more she eats, the bigger she gets, the faster we get her home! She did have 1 heart rate drop today, which we would love to hear she has had none but its better than 3, so she will still have the caffiene shot until these completely stop.

Kristen got great news tonight, the nurse said that Stella should be ready for a gown or onesie to wear as soon as tommorow. Soon our baby won't be in the buff any longer.

I have posted some pictures of our visit today. Sittre Paige was so excited to see her sister.

Please continue your prayers, they mean so much to us, and as you can see God is performing some great miracles on our baby right now!

Mommy's Turn

Today was hard....for me, her mom. Stella is doing well. She did have four heart rate drops today, which ultimately means she will still recieve the caffeine shots. This seems to be the norm, especially for babies under 35 weeks and under 5 pounds. The nurse said Stella was doing real good because they see babies that have 18-30 a day, so yes, we are blessed. They upped her formula to 12cc's by tommorow morning, she is a hungry preemie (like her dad...just not a preemie). This is good, the more weight, the less problems. They did put a blue light on her because her jaundice count was a little high. Other than that things are about the same, she seems to be improving. I am so thankful to God for this baby. She is just an angel. I did cry alot today . This is so hard, I took forgranted the day I walked out of the hospital with Sittre Paige. No one wants to see their child suffer and looking at Stella today was overwhelming. I couldn't look at her without tears in my eyes, its hard to be at home without her and then even worse leaving the NICU to come home. I know this is God's plan for our life. I am so thankful that God HAS a plan for our life. Sometimes this life is just hard, so that is how I am going to sum up our life right now. Please continue to pray for the day I can love on my baby. I long for this day. Thank you all.

New pictures and an update

Good news...tonight we both had the chance to hold Stella. She is now off of oxygen completely and getting better by the minute. We are in love with her and can't wait for her to start getting off the caffiene so we can take her home. By the way she smiled at me tonight and loves for her daddy to hold her.

Jared

A good 24 hours

Ok, so the last 24 hours was a very good step for Stella. First I must go back to Saturday morning and say one thing that I left off yesterday. Stella, on three seperate occasions Saturday morning was experiencing a low heart rate. The treatment was to give her caffeine every 24 hours to help stimulate her heart rate and keep it up (see Kristen caffeine isn't bad for me). They said that once they start taking her off the caffiene that it will take 4 days to get her completely off of it, because they can't just cut it off all at once. Once they have her completely off then she will have a 7 day countdown before she would be able to home. So it looks like we are looking at 11 days in there once she starts to come off the caffeine whenever that might be. On to some good news though. The good news is in the last 24 hours she has gotten her oxygen intake down to 21% for the last 12 hours and her breathing per minute has gotten down to around the 60's which is the maximum of where it needs to be. The oxgen level is what the rest of intake in regular air, which is really awesome. This being the case they have taken her off the cpap and put a regular tube in her nose like any other person would have when in the hospital. Also they are now about to attempt to give her a teaspoon of some preemie formula and see how she handles that. So the last 24 hours she has made a tremendous step towards improvement, but we still have a ways to go. She has a line in her belly button that they draw blood from for blood work. They told us that she might get that taken out tonight or tomorrow. Once they do that, Kristen and I will finally get to hold our daughter since neither one of us has gotten to do that yet.
That's about it for the info today. We will get to sit with her some more tonight so I will be sure to update with some pictures and also let everyone know how the feeding attempts went today.

Thank you everyone for the thoughts and prayers. They mean so much to our family.

Jared