The Clock Has Begun Ticking...

You know that feeling of the calm before the storm? That's sort of our life right now. We're slowly preparing for Anna's homecoming and realizing how incredibly unprepared we are. It's going to be really tough to live life without those monitors, to have to depend on our own parental instincts. All you parents out there, geesh, now we know what you felt all these years. Like the one nurse said tonight, there are two emotions of parents; worry and guilt. She hit the nail on the head there. If we're not worrying about Anna or how we will take care of her, then we're feeling guilty about our self seen inadequacies or again how we will take care of her. This little life depends on us fully and I think it's all just starting to sink in now. No more nurses, doctors, nutritionists, no more monitors, just Arthur, Anna and I. Oh and all of our precious fur-babies too. Yes, our life will now feel more complete, but in a sense it will also just begin again.

In any case, we are quickly preparing for Anna's departure from the not so glamorous hospital life because she in fact is just as quickly proving herself to be ready to come home. She has still taken every feed by bottle but that's also touch and go at the moment because it has only been one full day of bottle feeding. She has gained an amazing 71 grams overnight and now weighs 2221 grams which is about 4lbs and 14oz; almost to the big 5 pound mark! They also took her off caffeine, which we only learned tonight was a prerequisite for discharge. The caffeine to this day was helping her remember to breathe and prevent her from having spells. So as of today she is off, and she has to stay off of it for 5 days without any spells. That combined with the feeding and passing the car seat test and she will be discharged without problems! So based on the caffeine test, her earliest discharge at this point would be Sunday. Which is still amazing! The possibility of having her home with us by the weekend is just great. But we still have to see how she will cope with all of these changes. She might tire out, or she might just do great.

She has also developed quite the set of lungs in the last few days. I think since she is actually able to feel "hunger" now she's not as tranquil as she was in her earlier days. :) Here she is right before a feed...I just got a small snippet of her screech-fest caught on tape:



Marta & Arthur