Mac Meets Claire

Best News

Friday morning we brought Claire Home.

Update

Claire has been in the NICU for a month as of tomorrow. She is doing everything she is supposed to, almost. She is gaining weight (5lbs5 ounces tonight), maintaining her temperature and is eating well. We are just waiting for her apnea and some heart rate drops to go away. She was going to come home on a monitor, but her newest apnea spell took that idea away. We would rather her stay longer and not come home on a monitor. We know Heavenly Father has blessed us with this sweet little pea and is watching out for her. Malcolm is getting very anxious to meet her. That will be a very sweet moment. Keep her in your prayers.

More pics

Claire at 3 weeks old

Claire is so cute. We realized we had not taken recent pictures. She is so pretty. We found out she may be coming home this weekend. She will have to come home on a heart/ apnea monitor, but that is fine with us. We are keeping our fingers crossed. We realized Claire has goop in her eyes in these pictures. Preemies often get clogged tear ducts and so they have goo in their eyes. I wish I had cleaned her eye, but she still looks pretty! Enjoy

Update

We thought we would have Claire home by now but she has developed acid reflux so sever that it causes her to stop breathing. They are monitering her and evaluating what if any meds to give her.  This pic should give some scale of just how small she is. She grabbed my finger as she was falling asleep.

Update

I don't have any pictures to put up but I wanted to give an update. We thought Claire might be coming home soon but she started having some problems last night. She had some episodes of Apnea, where she stopped breathing, and hasn't done well keeping her temperature up. They are running blood work to see if she has an infection or what is going on. On top of this, I got really sick last night and can't see her for at least 24 hours. When it rains, it pours.

I am grateful for the nurses that care for our sweet girl. I would rather her be taken care of at the NICU, then to bring her home and have something terrible happen. Please keep her in your prayers and thoughts.

Home preparations

Claire continues her progress. Today they ran this test to make sure her vitals remain good while sitting in her car seat.

Update

Claire has been making great progress this past week. Almost too fast for us to document. It seems like every time we go in to see her she has made progress, even if we just left her for an hour to eat lunch. She is now in an open crib and maintaining her own temp very well. She has no IVs in. She is eating 4 times a day (the other feedings are through a feeding tube for the time being.) She is growing (as of last night she was 4 lbs 6 oz.) With any luck they will take the feeding tube out in the next couple of days and in a week she can come home. It will be so nice not to have to drive over to the hospital several times a day.

Claire is Eatting

So today Claire was given the chance to breast feed today, and she was able to do it twice. This morning she ate a lot, but she spit it all up shortly after (she just hadn't figured out how to swallow her food. She did it again this evening, but this time she held her food down. We are constantly amazed at how quickly she doing things on her own.

Attached is a video of us burping her and she is intrigued by the camera and is just tired.