Recap of Roxie's First Week....

I was discharged from the hospital on Tuesday (2/5). Knowing I would be going home, the NICU nurses decided it would be a good time to let me hold Roxie for the first time. (and as of yet, the only time I’ve been able to hold her.) The term they use is “kangaroo care”, which is skin to skin care. They pulled up a recliner, had me unzip my shirt and laid her right on my chest so that she could hear my heart beating. Because she still had all her cords and tubes attached, I couldn’t really snuggle her or anything except just sit there, but believe me, that was PLENTY. They let us just sit together for about 45 minutes or so. Since then, Aaron has gotten a chance to hold her as well, which was nice for him since it made him extremely jealous when I got to hold her! One of the nurses said they don’t want to do that all the time since she is so small, but as she gets bigger, we should be able to do it more often. They probably did more damage than good in letting us do that though, because now all we think about is when we can hold her again!

For now, they still have her on a CPAP machine. (that is the tube across her nose. It applies pressure inside her lungs, but she is actually breathing on her own.) They tried to take her off of that on Friday (2/8), but said she started to breath sort of fast, so they put her back on. Not a huge deal though. She is still pretty small, so it’s not uncommon what happened. We can’t wait until she is off of that thing though because then we could actually see her face AND she wouldn’t have to wear her little Smurf hat anymore either.

Also on Friday, they did a brain/head ultrasound to see if everything looked normal in there and to see if she had any bleeding. Thank God she passed that with flying colors!

She is now being fed small amounts of breast milk and as far as I know, she is handling that pretty well. She is also slowly gaining a little bit of weight. In fact, as of last night, her weight was at 2 lbs. 10 oz. (She was born at 2 lbs. 6 oz. and lost 3 oz. right at first.)

So…so far, things have gone very well. We haven’t really received any bad news. Roxie seems to be doing just fine. Everyone in the NICU always lets on like they are impressed by her and how feisty she is. Almost all the nurses we’ve had comment that she is “just such a doll.” And the nurses are fabulous! They've even made a few little scrapbook-type pages with pictures that hang in her little section. Here's a close up of one of the pictures one nurse took for us.....

She still has her little mustache on that protects her skin from the tube thing, but at least you can see her face.

As for Aaron and I, we’ve been visiting her everyday. It’s hard to visit and not want to smuggle her out the door - especially when she opens up those little eyes and squeezes her hand closed around our fingers.

It breaks our hearts not to be able to bring her home with us, but we know she’s where she needs to be for now. Aaron says she has to grow butt cheeks before she can come home anyway. (when we changed her diaper, we noticed that her "butt" doesn't even have actual cheeks yet. It's pretty much just flat without much of a crack!!)