mauter.com

We just got this in from Santa Claus.  It’s his personalized message for Samantha.

Things I don’t want to forget about Samantha right now:

1. “What doing, Mommy? What doing?” She asks me this 720 times a day. That’s not an exaggeration. You do the math.
2. She eats her lima beans first.
3. “Sam-a-do it! Sam-a-do it!!”
4. She loves to take turns patting and burping Ellie, and is sure to tell us when she spits up. “Ellie spill!”
5. She loves to pour. Anything. Everything.
6. She still loves to read.

Ellie had a much better day today. She is eating better, but it’s still a bit of a struggle to get her to eat.  It’s much better than yesterday though.  Each day will get better, I know. The good news is, it looks like she will still be discharged tomorrow!

Today our nurse went over some preliminary discharge paperwork.  We have already watched the video about the car seat, and watched the infant CPR video.  If anyone wants a refresher on infant CPR, we have a kit (including MiniBaby for practice) that you can borrow.  It was a pretty uneventful day.

Ellie will have an eventful night though!  During her bath tonight, they will remove the IV!  Yay!  And she’ll also have a “car seat test.”  I had been hearing about this all week, and wondering what it was.  Turns out, you have to bring in your car seat.  They set it all up with the baby in it, and monitor the baby’s oxygen levels for 30 minutes.  They want to be sure that the baby can make it home.  If the baby’s head is too floppy, they are afraid that it will cut off the air supply.  Most of the time they remove all the infant head wrap things and put 2 receiving blankets on either side of the head.  I’m not sure why this is better, but that’s what they’ll do.  Brian is stoked that we’ll get 2 hospital blankets.  I just returned the 5 that we took when Samantha was born!

Anyway, thanks for thinking of us all week.  I’m glad all my family is almost all home!

Day 2 has been better. Ellie has come off nearly all of her medicines and tubes. The doctors have started letting her eat now that she’s keeping oxygen in her blood in strong amounts. At her 9PM feeding, the nurse removed her glucose drip. Ellie ate 33mL of formula. We were hoping for 30, so that’s great! Hopefully we won’t need to get back on that drip anymore. She still has IV, but it’s only for an antibiotic.

In the morning if all goes well, they will move her over to a crib. She will still be in the NICU, but she won’t have all the junk hooked up to her. In a crib, you can more easily touch (still allowing only mommy and daddy to touch) and they will be closely watching her temperature. In the little bed she’s in right now, she’s on a heat lamp so she doesn’t have to use her energy to keep up her body temperature. The hope is that she can maintain her temperature without the lamp.

Here are some pictures. The infant next to her is on a bilibed so the colors in the following pictures are most likely not up to our Adobe-certified friends’ standards.

Eleanor Claire Mauter, “Ellie”, was born on May 2, 2010 at 1:27PM.  She is 5lbs 8oz and 19 inches long.  Mommy and Ellie are doing great!