12.23.10

Well, we had quite the exciting day!
First off, they dropped her down to .1 liter flow! Almost there! Dr. Hubbard said she may think about making her Christmas present to Harper the joy of NO NASAL CANULA!! But, mommy doesn't think that will happen so soon. Dr. Hubbard said she would just experiment with it, she doesn't think she would necessarily be able to be off of it for good yet, but maybe a little time without it, like when she is awake.
Then, the nurses have been slowly weaning her air temperature down because as she is able to regulate her own temperature better, they don't need her isolette to help her out as much. She has to have the bed down to 27 degrees Celsius before they will put her in an open-top crib, and she is currently at 27.8! Yesterday, she was at 30.8, so she's moving in the right direction.
And now, the most exciting part! Mommy got to give her her first bottle!! The nurse said we would give her about 20 minutes with it or until she doesn't seem interested anymore. She didn't think she would take very much, but Harper scarfed down 19 of the 29 cc's. The little piglet! Then, they just fed the remaining 10 cc's through her NG tube. Now, the only problem was, that at the next feeding she had about 7 cc's residual (typically, she doesn't have any or maybe a 1/2 a cc), which is a ton for her. I asked if the bottle feed from earlier may have caused that, and he said that she may have worn herself out on the bottle and, therefore, her little body didn't have enough energy left to digest all the feeding. She just has to get used to working to get her food. The bummer here was that Matt was going to get to try and feed her with a bottle at that feeding, but since we always want to do what's best for her, we decided to let her rest during that feed and just take it through the pump and NG tube. Now, remember, when she has residuals they always give that leftover back to her and then give her the feeding, so if you think about it, at the 7:30 feeding she actually ate 36 cc's of milk! Oh my goodness, was her little belly full! I was really worried she was going to have a big spit-up, so I refused to leave until she either spewed or I thought she was going to be ok. She did end up spitting up, but only a little, maybe a couple cc's. We called a few minutes ago to see how her residuals were for the 10:30 and she only had 1 cc!! Whew, good girl, way to digest! The nurse did say that while her 10:30 was through the NG tube as well, he was probably going to try a bottle again at the 1:30 feeding to see how well she handles it. The doctor said she could have 1-2 bottles a day, so it will be interesting to see if that large residual will happen when she takes bottles, and hopefully, she will get over that soon! It's just a new thing for her to get used to, I know.
We are really going to try and get after the breastfeeding tomorrow too. The lactation specialist is coming up to help out, because I think they would really like her to try and start latching on instead of just nuzzling and playing around like we've been doing the past couple of weeks. So, 1-2 bottles a day, 1-2 breasting feeding sessions a day, we are getting there. In order to go home, one item on her checklist is to take all feeding by bottle or breast, so we are up to 2-4 out of the 8! Keep on going little girl!
She weighed 1650 grams tonight, a whopping 3 lbs. 10 oz.! She gained 59 grams!