Hi everyone.

Sorry for the dead picture links this weekend. I tried to make an update late Friday night and it apparently failed.. unfortunately, i had to leave for Vancouver at 6AM on Saturday so I didn’t get a chance to fix everything until just now.

Hopefully everything is back online now! There should be some new pictures too!

Jade keeps progressing. She is still on a “whiff” of oxygen. They’ll keep testing her to see if and when she can go without. It’s just a matter of time really, probably a few days or a week. Last night she had her most successful breast feed yet! She was latched and sucking (until now she usually latched and fell asleep) for a good 20min. Got approximately 25ml.. which is half what she regularly takes for a feed. Today she might take more. Who knows! Just needs to keep growing.

This is my last week at work before I go on holiday, so I’ll be pretty busy this week and might not update the blog very often. I’ll try to take pictures though. We noticed last night that her “chubiness” has started to creep past her chin and into her cheeks! Cute little monkey!

Chris

NOTE: Alright, so we’re going to take a swing away from our regularly scheduled Jade updates and getting into some tech stuff. For those who might not know, I’m a computer technician at Malaspina U-C. I’d like to use this blog to record some of the stuff I’m doing for both my own personal archives, and for the benefit of people on the Internet who I know are looking for answers (because I just spent 2 hours on the internet looking for the answers I have here!).

Anyway, yesterday I updated the departments email server so that it had more robust Spam and attachment filtering. Below you’ll see what changes I made to Postfix, SpamAssassin, and Anomy to make everything work.
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Jade has been with us for almost two months now. That’s two months of isolettes and cradles, thermometers and scales.

What do we find out yesterday?

The Scale can convert to Pounds by itself!!!

Geez… a little information goes a long way.

Last night a nurse that we haven’t seen often weighed Jade and flipped a switch on the scale that made it go into lbs! I got her in the act. I was like “Hey! What did you just do! Was that pounds?”.

We got a good chuckle out of it.
Anyway, I guess you’d like to know how much she weighed, huh?
4lbs, 4.4oz

I double checked it with our trusty chart too!

In other news, there are New Pictures online. Go check them out. Jade is really filled out now. I wish my camera had audio… because she is now making all the cute little cooing and gurgling (and crying and wailing, but that’s cute too!) sounds that babies make.

The nurses removed her stick-on heart and breathing monitors yesterday! She’s almost free of all the wires. Now she just has the little sock that monitors her heart and oxygen saturation level, and her nose prongs. Little by little she’s shedding her medical necessities.

She’s also been taken off of her “puffer”. It was a puff, similar to an asthma puffer, of stuff to help her lungs expand. She doesn’t need that anymore, so they’ve taken it away.

The only “extra” stuff that she’s getting now is the tiny bit of oxygen and some vitamins (like vitamin E, cuz she’s never seen the sun!). They were talking about trying to take her off of the oxygen completely for a few hours. Hopefully that’ll happen today so we can get an idea how close she really is.

Oh, and you might remember me saying how we were participating in a study on a caffeine pill that they often give premies to help stimulate their lungs. Well, they decided she didn’t need the pill anymore as of a couple weeks ago now I think. So that’s gone too. She’s almost all natural!

Theresa has been trying to breast feed her the past few days. She still falls asleep before she really gets a full meal, but the last time she tried, we figure she got about 18ml… which is almost half what she would normally eat. Progress is good. As she grows and becomes stronger she’ll be able to eat more without falling asleep.

She gets mad now when she’s hungry.. it’s really cute. What’s even funnier is when Theresa is trying to breast feed her, Jade gets so comfortable up against T that she passes right out. We have to take her hat off to cool her off and make her a little uncomfortable so that she doesnt fall asleep so fast.

Weird stuff.
Anyway, that’s about it.

I also wanted to let you all know that, since May 10, I’ve had over 1100 different people visit this webpage. Now you can probably cut that number in at least half to get the real number of “unique” people visiting… and it’s probably half again than that… but even 250… that’s a lot! Theresa and I probably only know a few dozen people and relatives… so apparently the word has spread!

Thank you again for your interest. This blog is something I’ve really enjoyed doing.

Chris

4lbs 2.5oz!

She’s really starting to grow now! That 5 pound mark isn’t far off. Yesterday we got a little more information out of the nurses as to when they might ship her home.

The story is this…. they want to weane her off of the Oxygen. That’s the big thing for now. As with many medical treatments, (like asthma puffers and morphine), the body will get used to, and come to expect a certain amount of oxygen. Basically, it would make the lungs “lazier” than they should be and lead to problems for Jades breathing down the road.

So, they’re slowly decreasing the amount of oxygen she’s getting. As I said last time, she has times when she doesn’t seem to need the oxygen at all.. but there are others when she does need it. Hopefully as she grows more she’ll continue to need the O2 less and less.

So that’s criteria #1: no more O2

#2: Once she’s off the O2, she has to stay off of it and be 100% healthy for at least a week before they will let her go.

#3: Because she was born so tiny (only 1lbs 12oz remember!) they want to keep her until she’s at least 5lbs… which is a little more than the 2000g that they said before. This is just purely for developmental purposes… to make sure she’s ready to fend for herself and there aren’t any health problems that might pop up.

So that’s about it really.. the other thing they’d really like to see is Jade taking full meals from nursing/breast feeding we’re working on that now. She gobbles down the milk from a bottle very easily… but she still gets too tired if she does it at every meal, or is bathed before hand… and then she needs the tube into her stomach instead (”Gavage”).

All the feeding type things should improve as she grows and gains strength. Until then we’ll keep playing it by ear and making sure we recognize when she’s too tired to try breastfeeding or even too tired to eat from the bottle.

So given all of that, we think the soonest she’ll be home will be in about 3 weeks.

Finally… on the breastfeeding note. Things have been going progressively better. After trying again a few days ago, the nurses wanted Theresa to come in at every feeding time during the day (no night visits, yet ) so that she could try nursing everytime. Yesterday they think Jade took about 14ml from nursing… which is already almost half what she normally takes by bottle.

Nursing is, of course, much more difficult for Jade than the bottle… she has to work a lot harder, so hopefully she’ll continue to gain strength and eventually take her entire feeding (about 45ml!) from nursing.

Talk to you all again soon!
Chris

Hi everyone.

Hope you all had a great Canada day! We’ve been enjoying the sun here lately. We’ve also been putting in new laminate flooring! Our townhouse is looking great…

Anyway! About Jade! The little monster is doing great! She’s just over 4lbs now. About 4lbs 2oz. She’s had a few milestones lately.

She’s been feeding from a bottle much more often now, yesterday she took all her feeds except one from the bottle. She gets 44ml every 4 hours now. So she’s really hungry when it’s her turn to feed.
Last night, Theresa tried breast feeding her for the first time in quite awhile and Jade latched right on! She didn’t get too much milk, I don’t think she realised how hard she had to work or it.. but she got some, it was a great first effort! So now everytime we go in for her feeding Theresa is going to try putting her to her breast and see if we can get her used to that.

She’s really looking like a pudgy little baby now. She’s totally adorable. She’s also the only girl in the nursery right now. All the nurses love her. We keep her crib stocked up with lots of homemade blankets and sleepers that we bring in. She’s the best dressed in the place!

She’s doing better with her oxygen and breathing too. The doctor said on Thursday that he would like them to start “wheening” her off of the oxygen. So now they’re only turning up her oxygen when she can’t recover her saturation (% of Oxygen in her blood) to normal levels when they dip to below 88%. Usually that’s when she’s feeding.

This week has also been all about bathing. We bathed her ourselves for the first time this week. Theresa did it earlier in the week and I did it yesterday. It’s pretty entertaining. Jade isn’t really very impressed with the whole naked, cold, water thing… but yesterday she wasn’t too bad, she only cried a little. She also REALLY likes her hair being rubbed and washed. She coos.

Last night after we were feeding her, her nose prongs (that deliver oxygen) kept coming out, or Jade would pull them out. We just let her play with them for awhile because we noticed that her O2 saturation didn’t change when they were in or out! Which could mean that she really doesn’t need the oxygen nearly as much now! The nurse was impressed I think! Great stuff!

I think that’s it. Hope you enjoy the new pictures. I’ll try to take some more tonight. I also have some video of our new flooring that I’ll put up there in the next few days.

Thank you all for keeping tabs on our little girl! She has no idea how many people are thinking of her!

Chris