One Small Step for Babies, One Giant Leap for Ezri...

Well 13 must be lucky for Miss Ezri because today, her 13th day in the NICU she met two HUGE milestones toward coming home.

First, she was weaned into and open crib - no more incubator. She is holding her own temperature very well and seems to be enjoying being bundled up even more. It did make her a bit sleepy at first - it's a lot of work for a preemie to keep their own body temperature regulated - but by this evening she was wide awake and rarin' to go.

The even bigger milestone today - EZRI TOOK A FULL FEED BY BOTTLE! We were going to attempt it earlier in the day but decdied not to because she was already so tired from being in the open crib. Again, all of this is really exahusting for preemies, even something as simple as drinking from a bottle. Anyway, at her 9:00 feed, we were going to put her to breast as usual. She still seemed pretty exhausted, but started to perk up when we were doing her diaper change and wiping her down. By the time we were done getting her ready to eat, she was wide awake and getting very antsy to eat so we asked the nurse if we could try the bottle instead of the breast. We never thought we would be pushing her to take a bottle instead of breastfeed but if that's her ticket out of the NICU, so be it. We started her bottle feed and she sucked down 15 of her 35 mL right away - almost too fast so we stopped for a minute and then tried again. For a while she just sat there, looking confused, and then the nurse suggested we burp her. After two healthy burps, we went back to the bottle and she sucked down the rest, albeit at a better pace this time. With all of this excitement and the new world of noises that come with the open crib, Ezri was wide awake for a while after her feed so we got our first taste of trying to get a baby to go back to sleep...repeatedly. Luckily, when we come home, we can take shifts and one of us can actually sleep.

So the next step now is to continually increase the amount of times Ezri takes a bottle each day. They won't push her two fast for fear she'll have set back, so she'll be on one or two bottles a day for the next few days. However, if she is really showing interest and continues to do so well, they may increase her faster. Basically, it's all up to Ezri. We keep ttying to tell her how great "home" is so hopefully she'll get the idea and push them to let her out of there.