#bedrestproblems: Slow and steady wins the race...

Today is Charlie's 5 week birthday! I have been wanting to post sooner but sleep deprivation has left me with no ability to form complete thoughts or sentences so its taken me a while to muster the energy to put my fingers to a keyboard. A lot of you know what a champion I am when it comes to sleeping. Just ask Aaron- there's nothing I do better or enjoy more. This is probably one of the reasons why we put off having a child for so long. Actually, it definitely is a reason why. So just when I think I've reached my limit, the little man gives me a face like this and all is forgiven:

He also takes after his mom and is quite the champion sleeper himself.

So the NICU update is that we're still here. We're 10 days out from his due date of March 19th and we can't say if we'll be home by then or not. Charlie is still doing great and has really filled out, weighing in at 6 lbs 14 oz. He also has quite the personality and continues to give us some serious stink eye. Granted you can't blame him when his mommy likes to treat him like a doll and stick birthday hats on him every week. This is from his one month celebration:

In good news, the nasal cannula (the tube with prongs in his nose) came off a while ago and hopefully is gone for good. Charlie has made himself quite at home and has become very comfortable with food being shot straight to his stomach through a tube. Apparently he also takes to laziness and bed rest as well as his mom does. So we're focused completely on transitioning him to oral feeding where he's definitely made some progress but its been slow. He's learned to take up to about half of his food orally in a single feeding (which means by bottle or breast- I will apologize now for the use of the words "breast" and "pump" in this and future posts and will do my best to limit their frequency). Eating on his own can definitely wipe him out so some feeds we just need to let him rest and gavage feed him (which means feeding him completely through the tube in his nose). Sometimes I feel like we are going to be here until he's 18 but everyone here reassures me that Charlie's progress is great and things are moving along just the way they should. This experience has really taught me the virtue of patience which I didn't have much of before.

Also related to his feeding, Charlie had a big day Friday when he got his frenulum snipped. That's the tissue that connects your tongue to the bottom of your mouth. Charlie's was a little tight and affecting the range of motion of his tongue which is important for feeding. Apparently its a hereditary thing and not a preemie thing. Anyway, there is a very experienced doctor here at UW that specializes in treating them and assured us it was a simple procedure with no real downside so we went ahead with it. It was a little more traumatic than we thought but Charlie recovered well after looking like a little vampire with blood dripping out of his mouth for just a minute. And now we do mouth exercises with him to teach him how to use his newly freed tongue.

Charlie has quite the entourage here in the NICU- multiple residents, a fellow, an attending physician, a day nurse, a night nurse, a nutritionist, a respiratory therapist, a physical therapist and several lactation consultants. They're all amazing baby whisperers and make me want to come back in my next life as one of them.

Thanks for all the well wishes and kind thoughts for Charlie! Please cross your fingers for us that he also takes to eating as well as his mom does. Here are some pictures and videos from the last few weeks with the biggest highlights being Charlie meeting both sets of grandparents and his Aunt Emily for the first time!