Milestones

Noah continues to amaze us more and more every day.

I am back at work now, and it is a struggle to leave him those four days a week, even knowing what wonderful care he has when I'm not there. Even harder is not being there for every new amazing thing he does. Darren called today while I was covering study hall to tell me that Noah rolled over, all by himself, for the first time today. Darren said he was doing tummy time and just got so sick of it that he decided to roll over on to his back. I was absolutely ecstatic, and after sharing the news with my study hall students, I called my mom to let her know. It wasn't until I had had a few minutes to sit there and let it sink in, that the sadness crept in - he will only roll over for the first time once, and I didn't get to see it. It was so spur of the moment that Darren didn't get to video tape it either. Obviously every milestone he reaches is something to celebrate, regardless of whether or not I am there to see it. But I still can't help the little tiny bit of bittersweetness I feel.

On a brighter note, it's definitely a sign of more big things to come. The occupational therapist visits every Monday now, and after her session with Noah this week (just her second visit overall), she told me she was confident he would be rolling over by the end of the month. Who knew it would actually be by the end of the week?! Every day he is doing better and better at grabbing for and holding on to objects. He is already starting to try to get them to his mouth :o) And more importantly, he has totally embraced bottle feeding, beyond any of our expectations. He absolutely loves drinking from the bottle, holding on to our hands while eating, whining if we take the bottle away to burp him. He has yet to need a tube feeding during the day this week! The only tube feedings he is getting now are his continuous feed at night. After talking with the speech therapist yesterday during her visit, we have decided to slowly start increasing the size of his bottles during the day, so that we can start decreasing what he gets at night. Eventually, maybe even by Thanksgiving, he won't need the night (and therefore tube) feedings at all. Now that is something to be really thankful for!

I keep trying to come up with the right words to end this post with - to sum up how excited, encouraged, blessed, thankful, etc. we feel, but I don't think any of those words do it justice. I don't know if there are ANY words out there that can adequately explain how we feel. It's amazing. HE is amazing. Our life is amazing :o)

Phew!

Thank goodness this weekend looks to be a lot more pleasant than last weekend. Noah started coming down with a cold last week, mostly just a stuffy nose in the morning that would clear up by noontime. But on Friday, it didn't clear up, and by that evening he had a bad enough cold that we took him in to the pediatrician, just in case. The pediatrician assured us that his lungs sounded fine, and to run the vaporizer in whatever room he was in. Unfortunately, by 10 pm that night, Noah was definitely starting to tighten up in his chest, and I set us up in the bedroom with two vaporizers and the rocking chair. I was prepared to rock him there all night, since he seemed to have a much easier time being held upright. By midnight however, he was laboring pretty hard to breathe and sounded AWFUL, so we called the ambulance to take him to the emergency room. As if that wasn't upsetting enough, when I was in the ambulance with him and we were preparing to leave, I asked to go to CMMC instead of Farmington only to have the paramedic tell me that with the way he sounded, we didn't have the extra time to go to CMMC. Scary!!

They gave him a nebulizer treatment in the ambulance, which seemed to help a little, but not nearly enough. So at the hospital, they decided to admit him. Turned out he had croup, and with his narrow airway, what should have been just a mild case turned out to cause more trouble with him. In the end, it wasn't that bad. He received two more nebulizer treatments and a shot of decadron (a steroid to held reduce the swelling in his vocal chords), and I slept propped up on some pillows on a hospital bed with him in my arms. All in all, despite our originial hesitation about bringing him to Farmington, they treated him, and us, very well. Before the ambulance left, I told Darren to make sure he brought Noah's NICU discharge summary with him, so that the hospital staff would know what they were working with, and they were very pleased that we had. They all commented on how amazing he looks considering everything he went through.

They ended up discharging him around 1 pm on Saturday and sent us home with an oral dose of decadron to give him that evening. And so ended the most current leg of our tour of New England hospitals. We now stand at five ;o) He slept most of the day on Saturday, but by Sunday was starting to act like his old self. He seems to be completely cleared up and feeling good now. PHEW!