Day 10

Want to hear some great news? Keep reading this post!

1. Annaleigh is doing great! Not only did the doctor say that her infection is all but gone, but also she is now stable enough to have been moved into her own isolette! Remember, the nurses said that they would only move a baby into an isolette if he/she was “stable,” and poor Annaleigh has been anything but stable lately. This is such great, great news!

2. Charlie is eating again! As of this post, he’s eaten four times (noon, three, six, and nine) and he’s digesting it just fine. The first time they fed him, he was having a lot of episodes and they had to stop. But that was when he was eating formula; now, Brooke has been pumping to get them all breast milk, and the doctors are confident that the babies can digest breast milk a lot more easily.

3. Lily has gained weight! She’s the first of the babies to actually regain her birth weight! At birth, she was one pound 8 ounces; this evening, she weighed in at one pound 8.4 ounces! They originally told us to hope for them to regain the birth weight by the time they were about two weeks old, so she’s ahead of schedule. She’s always been the smallest but she’s growing strong! (Annaleigh hadn’t been weighed by the time we left the NICU at 9:30 tonight, so for all we know she’s also caught up to her birth weight. But if she hasn’t, that means Lily is no longer the smallest baby.)

4. For the first time since the womb, all three babies are together! Since entering the NICU, Annaleigh has been in the first bed in the first row; my mother-in-law hates that she’s there, swearing that it’s “too much traffic” for her to be able to relax. Charlie has been in the side row, all the way back, and Lily has been two beds away from him. Now, they moved Annaleigh into her own little house right between her siblings! In Brooke’s belly, she was in the middle the whole time; Charlie was the lowest and Lily was all spread out on the top. They’ve finally gotten back to where they all started.

This was by far the best NICU visit we’ve had. All good news tonight. I can’t say how (or why) it made me so happy to see all the babies lined up next to each other in their little isolettes. I was tearing up when I was standing with them all at once. It was awesome.

We’re certainly not able to relax yet and we are by no means done with drama. We know that we’re only ten days in to a journey that will most likely last three months, and there will most definitely be set backs and hard times. But we’ve both been exhausted like no other time in our lives lately, and we really needed tonight. To have a visit where everyone is doing well, everyone is progressing… it was just perfect. Now, if only we could find a way to fast-forward through the next few months….