Saturday, June 11, 2011

First NICU Follow-Up Appointment

Some people like to sleep with a leg sticking out of the covers…Abby likes to sleep with her legs outside of the crib!




 

On Tuesday, we went to our first NICU Follow-Up appointment. We managed to get all four kids ready to go, loaded up, and to The Children’s Spot on time! It was our first time trying to move all four kids to another location at the same time. Whew! Success!

Since it was our first time out with all of the babies, we also got the first reaction to our quadruplets. There was a lady with her son who was sitting just inside the doors of the medical building when we walked in carrying four car seats. Her jaw dropped and then just hung open the entire time that we were talking to the lady at the front desk and getting directions to our doctor’s office. It was still hanging open when the elevator doors closed, and I lost sight of her. She never said a word, but her face said it all. Hehe!

Caleb did a fantastic job with his alarms over the past few weeks that he has been home! He did so well, that they took him off of his monitor! (The monitoring company downloads the data from their monitors and sends it to the doctor ahead of the appointments.) He is still on thickened formula, but we can try to move him toward thinner formula if we use a slower flow nipple. For the time being, we are keeping things the way they are until he is a little bigger, but I think we will try to move him to the thinner consistency in the near future. He weighs 9 ¼ lbs!

Abby is still having some alarms so she is still on her monitor. We asked to have her evaluated to see if we could lose her oxygen though. They did a Room Air Challenge with her which is a pretty simple way to see if she is ready to be without her O2. They got a baseline oxygen saturation level for her with her oxygen on and then removed her cannula and monitored her oxygen saturation level for an hour at room air. She did well and kept her sat level in the 93-95% range. We were hopeful that we could start the weaning process with her, but when the doctor looked at her weight on the growth curve, she is falling a bit behind. The doctor decided that asking her to eat more to gain weight and lose her oxygen at the same time might be a bit much for her. We are still struggling to get her to take her entire feeds by mouth and that is kind of working against us in the weight gain department. The decision was made to increase the number of calories per ounce instead of the volume of formula that she is consuming and keep her on her oxygen for a while longer. Hopefully in two weeks when we go back for our next appointment, we can reevaluate her oxygen needs. Abby also reached a milestone last Friday: She has been migrating to the edge of the crib for a couple of weeks now so that she can stick her feet out, but on Friday she flipped from her tummy to her back! She has only done it once, but it was exciting! She now weighs 7 lbs 7 ¼ oz.

Elijah also did great with keeping his alarms to a minimum! They said that he could lose his monitor as well, but I opted to keep it for two additional weeks. He did have a few more alarms than Caleb, and, to be honest, I’m kind of using his monitor as a crutch. Taking the monitors away means that I won’t have something ring off if they have an episode. Obviously the doctor wouldn’t take them off of the monitor if she thought something would go wrong, but I figured that getting rid of one monitor at a time would help me ease into it. Elijah has to stay with his thickened formula for a while longer. He did a Video Swallow Gram when we were in the hospital and failed it. It showed that he needs honey thick liquid to keep from aspirating the formula into his lungs. They won’t reevaluate his need for thickener until six months from the date of the last test. He now weighs 8 lbs. 15 ¾ oz.

Ellie has to stay on her monitor for several more weeks. She has had the most alarms of all of the babies. Nothing too crazy, but the duration of some of her alarms is longer than ten seconds which means that she still needs it. The good news about our little runt is that she is growing well! She weighs 6 lbs 5 ¾ oz.

And we also have an update on Beckett! Beckett’s parents, Ryan and Natalia, were able to bring their baby home after a very long NICU journey beginning in January. We are so happy that their little family is back together! To see their update, you can read about his home going on their blog. Thank you for praying for our little friend and his parents! http://ryanandnataliakreinbring.blogspot.com/

 A few snapshots from around the house:

Daddy and Eli



 


A very tired Mommy and Ellie



 


Caleb curled up asleep



 


Mommy and her girls



 


Great-Grandpa Larry and Great-Grandma Twilla



 


Daddy and all of the babies



 


Mommy and all of the babies



 


Family Photo!!




--posted by Becca

9 comments:

  1. Awesome....Congratulations and huge Praises! Just the beginning of the "outings" with quads- comments, jaws dropped and all- So excited for you all! thanks for the updates!!! Beautiful family! Kami :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. congratulations Sean & Rebecca! glad your babies are all doing great :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. It gives me so much joy to see your picctures & find out how well the babies are growing. God be praised!

    ReplyDelete
  4. The pictures say it all! What a beautiful family!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Those kids are growing up fast. So awesome!

    ReplyDelete
  6. It looks like everyone is getting along great!!! Keep up the good work. Eventually every task will no longer be a task but just every day life. However i can't imagine loading up car to take them anywhere. I would have my mouth dropped too.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Aww! they are starting to get chubby! SO happy to hear they are doing well. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  8. You guys look awesome! All of you!!!

    ReplyDelete
  9. So happy to hear that things are going reasonably well. Your first pic made me think of my daughter...I caught her doing that one day during a nap! :) So cute! We are still praying for you all!

    ReplyDelete

We would love to hear what you think! Please know that all comments are on a slight delay as we approve them on our end. Thanks for commenting!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...