The one thing that I still don’t get, though, is that she seems to have this really sensitive gag reflex or something. Everything that goes in her mouth, it seems like she gags for a split second each time.

That was actually one of the more humorous gags, but you can hear it slightly there before she pulls it back into her mouth. Usually she keeps it in her mouth and does the gag noise. Most of them she actually ate, too, this time around, anyway. At first I thought it was because I was putting it in her mouth, but she seems to do that when she feeds herself, too. (Which she’s still having a bit of trouble doing with these things since they’re small.)

I hope we get there soon, though, because I’m so done with baby food. I think she is, too, really. She really wants to feed herself (most of the time) so I almost have to hold her hands down to get a bite into her mouth or she flings it all over the walls and my face, etc. We also have an infant feeder so that helps there.

She’s on formula yet through July, too, per pediatrician’s orders. I’m ready for the transition to milk! I’ve given her a very little bit here and there so I guess once we hit July we’ll start increasing the amount of milk and reducing the formula amount in each bottle.

And along these same lines, I’d love, love, LOVE it if this child would stop gritting her teeth! That would make me very very happy indeed. I can’t stand that noise, and it’s not good for her teeth either. I don’t know what to do to make her quit though??? Help!

Kayleigh went with us to the gatherings, of course. We’ve been keeping her home and away from germs as much as possible but Thanksgiving really is a smaller holiday for us. We don’t see any of Steve’s extended family anymore and we see very little of mine and at both locations, we only ended up meeting up with about half the people. But it was still good to see everyone that we did get to see.

I am not going to bother to go through every little thing I am grateful for, that sort of list would go on for ages. But suffice it to say, this was a pretty nice treat:

ugh.

(Quite literally, too, since TBS sees fit to show this clip constantly in the commercials and Elijah literally copies it second for second because he thinks it’s hilarious.)

She now weighs about 12 lbs, 3.5 oz (5.54 kg) which is up about a full pound from the last time she was weighed, right at a month ago. She’s grown out of her newborn clothes and it was bittersweet for me today to go through and take them out of her drawers and set them aside.

She’s a little bit behind on some things, but I think that’s to be expected. For instance, she still wobbles her head pretty good when holding it up. It’s strange, because she started to get control pretty early but we’re not worried, it will come in time. But because of this, the pediatrician does not yet want to start her on any rice cereal.

However, she’s also ahead a little bit – she can roll over both ways! Here’s 56 seconds of K rolling around a bit and lifting her head and what not. The third clip though she is just talking until she notices me there. Yeah, she is doing a really weird thing with her eyes there.

That’s the other thing we discussed. I think that all she is doing is trying to focus on something, it seems to happen when she’s trying to look about 8 to 10 feet away. It doesn’t happen all the time, though, either. We might go 4 days and not see it and then have a day where it happens several times. She’s due to see the eye doctor in early December – apparently preemies can have all sorts of eye issues. In May when she saw him last he said to me, “I see no problems that are typical to preemies,” but, of course, it is now nearly 5 months later. So we’ll see. The pediatrician told us that if we see it getting worse, though, to go in earlier to her eye doctor.

That’s about it, though, everything’s on pretty much the up-and-up. The doctor did say that we should start physical therapy with K though, so I guess we’ll have to start up home visits again. Blah, I hate home visits. Beats taking the kid out in the dead of winter, though.

And then this video:

Dear MSNBC,

Just at which point did that guy’s skin color change from black to white? Obviously, it must have been some time before your clip started.

NEWSFLASH:

That man you showed wearing the assault rifle was NOT WHITE. He was a black man. Therefore, you are lying. Why is it that if someone is white and disagrees with something the president says or does, they are automatically labeled as a racist? In most cases it has nothing to do with that! In fact, I have yet to actually encounter someone who disagrees with him simply because he is (half) black. You are attempting to mislead the American people to get them to believe what you want them to believe, that only a white man would or could ever disagree with the president, that only a white man would, gasp, own a gun, and that all white people are, therefore, racist. YOU are the ones creating this “racial tension” and “undertones.” The average Joe does not feel this way. It is time for biased media to go the way of the buffalo. You will soon find that people are trusting, watching, and listening to you less and less as they turn for more reliable, more un-slanted reporting!

Signed,
someone who’s not an idiot.

When I last posted (5-2), she was 2lbs, 12oz. She is now 4lbs, 3oz (as of the night of 5-23). She’s now part of this babyicu.com thing where I can log in and see photos (apparently rarely though) and a graph of her weight. It only charts the last 20 though, so I’m taking screenshots and putting them together, here’s what we have (click to view larger, weight is in grams):

So that’s pretty neat.

K is now on the nasal cannula full time and has been for a while though she is also back on the high humidity. They had taken her off of it to “home” oxygen (I believe it’s called) but she apparently still needed some of the pressure that the high humidity offers and so she went back on that. It’s not a set back, necessarily, it’s just that she wasn’t ready to move forward. The high humidity, though, puts out humid air forced into her nose rather than just having a steady flow of just oxygen, if that makes any sense. She was originally on 5 liters (per minute) but is currently on 4. Hopefully that will continue to go down here soon.

But she’s 35 weeks gestational age so she’s at the point where she’s started to maintain her temperature better (putting on weight helps with that) and is starting to learn to suck, swallow, and breathe all at the same time. So a few days ago, she got out of the incubator and into a crib. It’s so ironic because in our discharge class and elsewhere they talk about how at home you want the baby to sleep on her back with no blankets and nothing in the bed to avoid SIDS. Yet here, they have her bundled up in a blanket with another blanket on top of her with positioners and lots of stuff in her bed and she can sleep on her side or tummy or back. Of course, it’s ok now because she’s on the monitors and surrounded by nurses and doctors, it just strikes me as weird. However, soon they’ll start transitioning her to that back to sleep position all the time.

Last Monday morning, my father-in-law went into the blood bank and donated some blood especially for Kayleigh. The doctors had been saying the previous Saturday that she was probably going to need some blood as her red count was not quite where they wanted it and that they would check later. In other words, it was something she needed but it wasn’t a priority and they expected the blood to be done processing Wednesday. On Tuesday, the blood was ready and they checked her again and she’d actually gone down in her account so they went from a “probably going to need it” to “ok, gotta do it now.” She got half of it Tuesday night and half of it Wednesday night. 16 milliliters over 4 hours each time, so a total of 1 and 1/15 of an ounce. She seems to be doing better now that she’s gotten it. The big issue with her was that with not enough red blood cells, she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Apparently, red blood cells live about 120 days so hopefully before all these die off her body will be making enough for her.

She’s still feeding with tube now but is starting to learn with the occupational therapist (OT) to take a bottle. We’ve started with this bottle that has a variable nipple that you control with a dial, on level 0, which is more like a pacifier. We dip it in milk then let her suck on it. But the process is very slow going, don’t want to stress her out. She needs to work on her breathing at this time mostly. However, she shows great interest and the OT and I even cracked up when she did the “whole eyes closed but searching for something to suck on so she opens her mouth wide and shakes her head furiously” thing. She had to get a new feeding tube a bit early this past weekend because her PGA came with some blood (PGA is what they suck out of her stomach with a syringe to see how much she’s digested). And, apparently for the first time, she fought it. So that is apparently a good sign as far as bottle feeding goes.

She didn’t like it either, as you can hear!

I guess that’s enough for now, I’ll try to update more, heh. But now it’s time to get a shower as my boys are giving me the present of heading to the hospital alone today while they do Father-Son stuff!

Here are some more photos: