Saturday July 7th

Day 3 in the NICU for Elijah and I have been discharged from the hospital. I won't lie, leaving the hospital without Elijah was every bit as hard as I thought it would be. I called through the night to check on him and they said he took 15 mil at his 1 AM feeding and at his 7 AM feeding. His chest   X-ray was clear so he got the all clear on that, there had been some junk in it on Thursday, don't remember if I mentioned that! Unfortunately his bilirubin numbers have went up and he has been placed on the bilirubin lights, I believe his numbers were around 14.8, They don't consider them extremely high but they wanted to get on top of them.

Since we got discharged today we didn't get to make his 1 PM or 4 PM feedings, we needed to get settled and wanted to give him plenty of time under the lights.

When we went to his 7 PM feeding the warned us that if he didn't start taking his bottles faster they would have to put a NG tube in. They want him to take his bottle in under 30 minutes, after that he is burning more calories than he will get from the feeding. Unfortunately he didn't take his feeding in the allowed time and they decided to go ahead and put the NG tube in.

Steve and I went back at his 1 AM feeding and he was completely wide awake and looking around. It was nice to see his beautiful eyes looking around at us. He took his entire feeding by bottle this time. Hopefully the 7 o'clock feeding was a one time thing and he will keep going with the bottle.