spoken for

I know. I totally suck when it comes to updating lately. I think this is the longest I’ve gone without posting something here in the 5+ years I’ve had this domain.

We’ve settled into a routine, I guess. K finally is pretty good with her days and nights not being mixed up and she pretty much sleeps from 11pm or a bit earlier through to 11am, if I am sure to start her feeds and change her diaper from time to time. She might get up at 8am but often goes back to sleep. The past two days she went back to sleep at such a rate that she choked on her bottle and had a heart rate drop. If she’s not waking up, I tube feed her. The gastro doctor’s office just told me today that we can start dropping the 2 am feeding. We did a little 48 hour test and she’s getting enough to eat all the other times and she slept right through and didn’t make any noise to wake me until closer to 5 so, yay, I get to get more sleep.

As it was, I was going to bed as soon after her 11 pm feeding as possible so no earlier than 1130 then getting up at 145 to start her next feeding so back to sleep about 230, though I’d doze a lot of times, of course. I try to stay awake just so that I have my wits about me if her feeding pump starts beeping for some random reason. So then I’d be up again at 445 then back to sleep as soon as possible so around 530 then up again at 745 and if I wasn’t too terribly tired, I stay up after that feeding and have a little time to get a shower and some things done before 11. So even just dropping the 2am feeding is going to help me get some better quality sleep. Even if I have to spend that sleep time on the couch.

I figure I won’t be sleeping back upstairs until after this kid’s off oxygen. I need to be close should her monitors go off (not to mention the constant feedings) and I just know that the first time one went off in the night and I was upstairs I’d kill myself trying to get downstairs. I spent a few nights in Elijah’s bed while he slept in mine and that was so nice but he decided he doesn’t care for that. He wants to sleep in the living room but I am not allowing it as he’s recently fallen off my bed and the love seat in the middle of the night.

But the rest of my day is mostly spent holding K because she refuses to be put down if she’s awake, and sometimes if she’s asleep. I’m not sure how to break this. I can’t remember what it was like with E anymore. Eventually I know she’ll grow out of it though.

K is up to 9 pounds and 4.5 ounces though, as of Tuesday. So, assuming the scale at the pediatrician’s and the scale at the pulmonary doctor’s aren’t that far off from one another, she’s gained more than her one ounce a day they want her to gain over the past week and a half.

The pulmonary doctor told us we can turn down her oxygen to 1/8th though so I did that last night. What stinks, though, is that the probes for the oximeter STINK. They don’t last for anything. I’ve had to call twice now for some more. And now that we’ve turned her down, we want her on the meter more to make sure she’s keeping enough oxygen in her blood. But the stupid probes keep breaking, and for no reason at all, it’s not like we’re rough on them. We also go through a lot of the stickers that go on her face to hold her oxygen tubes where they need to be, they call them Tender Grips. K likes to pull them off, crazy kid.

That’s about it on the health front, I think. Her next appointment is another one with the pulmonary doctor, then a few days later the pediatrician, then the surgeon that did her fundo and G-button, then a children’s urologist, then the gastro doctor again, and then a children’s renal doctor… and that brings us up to the end of August. :P Lots of appointments for this kid for her first couple of years! The pediatrician wanted us to make the urologist and renal doctors see her on the same day but they weren’t readily available and I didn’t feel like calling back and forth to work it out. After all, it’s still better than going out every day, day after day after day after day. I can handle one here, one four days later or a week later, etc.

A friend came the other day and took pictures for us like she did when Elijah was born. That’s one of the photos you saw at the beginning of the post but here’s my absolute favorite: