Updates: January 10th - 8 days old

Little Mario continues to thrive and impress us all. Everyone, from the nurses to the resident to the lactation consultant, has comment on how well he is doing. I think he has exceeded a lot of expectations and is showing us just how strong he is.

His feeds remained the same today (33mL of BM 22 - breastmilk fortified with the 22 additional calories and vitamins and such), though they are now given over 30 minutes on the pump. The resident decided to wait until tomorrow to change anything to give his little body another day to adjust to everything. When we left the hospital around 10:30 this evening, he hadn't been written up once for one of his spells. The nurses commented that he's having less self-stims too.

Dom and I both spent time with him today. We are actively involved in the assessments before the feeds we are there for and are experts at taking temperature, changing diapers, performing cord care, changing clothes, and weighing him. His weight was up again this evening. He is now 4lbs, 0.2oz.

I worked with the lactation consultant again this afternoon. We worked with the nipple shield and Mario is really taking to breastfeeding. He really latches on and has good spurts of sucking and great full jaw action when he sucks. We could see him swallow several times, so we know he was getting some breastmilk for his efforts. I worked with breastfeeding him for 10 minutes at his noon feeding and will continue to do this for the next several days.

They are continuing to wean his incubator temperature down. This evening it was at 28.8 C and they want it to get down to 28 C before they'll move him out of it. His nurse tonight said she intended to wean it down throughout the night. She said that before they move them out of the incubator they swaddle them in a blanket, like they will in the crib, to get them used to that. So, she may try that and see if she can get the incubator temperature down quite a bit. We are hopeful that he may be out of the incubator as early as this weekend.