days 19 and 20.

 #mybabyisawesome

Still not sure why she needs tylenol up her bum.

Trying to escape!

Already takes control of the TV remote...

Yeah. That's pretty much all there is to say.

Ruthe got her chest tube and arterial lines taken out yesterday, so we got to hold her!!

They got her up to 16cc's of breast milk every hour last night, with is technically a full-feed. and that means as soon as she's weaned off the pressurized oxygen I can start trying to breast feed her!! They'll get her started on bottles, too, when I'm not there, and so they can measure how much she's taking in.

Since they extubated her, and put in the nasal cannula, her air supply has been pressurized to help keep her lungs open and push out all the fluid that built up in them from surgery and medications. They're slowly turning that down and watching how she deals with doing more work herself. They also take an x-ray of her chest everyday to see how much fluid there still is in her lungs. Once all of that is low enough, they'll take her off the oxygen completely.

She's also being weaned off of her blood-thinner medication [heparin].  They'll get her off that completely and on plain aspirin, since that's something I can give her myself, without any medical training.

UPDATE!!  Ruthe is a rock star.  She's off oxygen and heparin completely!  AND we tried out bottle-feeding a couple times tonight and she took some!  She only ate 3cc's from the special cleft palate bottle, but for a two-and-a-half week old baby that's never had to work for her own food before, I'd say that's pretty dang impressive!!  The nurses don't want us to force her to use a bottle any more than she can handle, so when she started to get fussy I let her stop.  She still has a feeding tube, and she'll have that pretty much until we take her home.  As she gets stronger and starts eating more on her own they'll decrease the amount she gets through the tube.  Once the doctors are convinced that she's getting a sufficient amount of food by mouth, and as long as she stays off all the other things, she'll get to come home!

Tonight when John and I went to visit the nurse  helped me  put a nightgown on Ruthe.  She looks so cute in clothes.  :)  She can only really wear the snap-up shirts and the long newborn nightgowns because of all her IV lines, and I don't know that I could comfortably put her into anything myself, but it sure was nice to have her in jammies to snuggle with tonight!

I also got to pick her up out of her bed all by myself!  It seems like such a simple thing.  Picking up your baby.  Mommas do it a hundred times every day.  That was the first time I've been the one to actually lift her out of bed, and it was awesome!  [The video of us getting her dressed and me picking her up won't load, because it's almost three minutes long.  :/  So enjoy this picture of my sweet snugglebutts instead!]