Celebrating every little milestone!

This week started off fairly stressful as Drake had his first surgery with general anesthesia at five days old. Sunday he was put to sleep to have a central line placed in his chest. This will serve as IV access during his entire stay in the NICU. Typically a PICC line is used on preemies and is done at the bedside in the NICU. After three failed attempts to have the PICC line placed the doctors determined the veins in his arms and legs just couldn't handle the line. The central line was inserted in his chest and threaded up to a large artery near the opening to his heart, and the port is taped to his chest. Up until this point he had a peripheral IV on his hand. It kept going bad and he was having to be poked again and again to keep the IV access that the doctors needed to administer his medication. He did great during the surgery and woke up from the anesthesia well and resumed breathing on his own without assistance - great job little buddy!!

As nervous as we were on Sunday, Monday brought two big milestones for our little man. When I arrived at the hospital this afternoon and looked at his monitor I immediately noticed that his oxygen levels were no longer being tracked. The nurse advised that Dr. Clark ordered the o2 monitoring be discontinued since had maintained his oxygen levels since birth and it was no longer a concern at this point. One set of wires removed from our little guy!

Over the last 4 days he has been slowly introduced to eating through his feeding tube. The doctors call it "gut priming", making sure he is able to handle very small amounts of food to get his digestive system working and ensure that everything is working as it should. He has handled the very small amounts of food okay and has had some dirty diapers that indicate he is digesting the food properly. Tonight they started his feeding schedule of breast milk.  The schedule is roughly 5 days long and they slowly increase the volume of milk he gets at each meal. He had his first feeding on his schedule tonight while Andy and I were there and he was able to take the feeding all through a bottle! From what we have heard from the nurses, it is great that he was able to handle sucking, breathing, and swallowing (coordinating these three actions takes some work for a preemie) his feeding at a gestational age of 32 weeks. The doctor did advise that he may not be able to keep up with using the bottle for longer periods of time as the feeding amounts increase, and that would be normal. For now though, he is doing it so we celebrate! :)

Here is a short video of the nurse feeding and burping him :)

We also had an ice cream date with Grammy and Kellan tonight at his favorite place, Cocomero. When you're two it is fun to do anything you can NOT to smile when your Mom asks you to :)