Wednesday July 11th

Sorry for the silence today, I think the exhaustion finally caught up with me last night and this morning. Elijah didn't have the overall best eating day yesterday and seems to have hit a wall with bottle feeding. Between the feedings, his bilirubin numbers going up instead of down and the bowel loop I was feeling pretty discouraged and it got the best of me.

I went to Elijah's 7am feeding this morning with my mom and he took about half of his feeding from the bottle and the rest from his NG tube. His nurse this morning was a different one again, she was kind of a scatter brained person but seemed pretty nice. Steve got off early and was able to make it to his 10am feeding with me, Elijah was pretty sleeping and only took about 10mils of his feeding from the bottle and the other 30mil from the NG tube. I pretty much hit my breaking point at this feeding and couldn't hold back the tears anymore. It didn't help that the nurse wasn't very helpful and told us we were feeding him wrong, which would be fine but she didn't offer any suggestions to help the situation. When we left I went home and pumped and went straight to bed, I got 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep and I woke up feeling much better.

When I called to check on his afternoon feedings they said he didn't do much better at his 1pm feeding than this mornings and the occupational therapist was there to do his 4pm feeding. She recommended that we go get preemie nipples from babies r us so I called immediately to have them hold some for us to pick up later.

Steve and I went to his 7pm feeding and brought the new nipples with us, again we had a nurse we had never seen before. Luckily she was very nice and explained things well. She said the O.T. had recommended that we not push feedings on Elijah, we will watch his hunger signals and if he seems awake, alert and interested in a feeding we will attempt the bottle. If he doesn't seem awake or interested we won't push it and will go ahead and feed through the tube. The hope is that he will save his energy and every few feedings have enough energy to take an entire feeding via bottle. We don't want to push the feeding and create an aversion to feeding that causes long term affects.

When the Dr first told us we could be looking at the 15th-20th for a coming home date I figured he was being cautious and it wouldn't be that long. Yesterday it hit me that in reality he probably won't be home until the 20th. It makes me cry just thinking about it but I know its whats best for him. I can't wait until I can just sit and hold him anytime I want, or go in his room and watch him sleep whenever I want. We did get some cute pictures of Elijah today and although he didn't eat I did get to snuggle him a lot!