Week 25
Or at least it would be week 25 if The Dictator had not decided to flee. Today will be day 7… In some ways time is dragging on, but in other ways, I can’t believe how quickly the week went by.
The Dictator is still pushing forward. Breathing continues to be an issue. They put him back on the ventilator for now but until he starts showing some initiative and breathing on his own, i’m not sure how long that will be the case. That being said, chest xrays of his lungs show that they continue to open and that he is doing fairly ok. The heart echo showed that the valve in his heart was closed so that is an awesome sign and today is his scan to check for bleeding in his brain.
The wiggle monster continues to wiggle, but he was still enough yesterday for me to get to hold him for a bit… HEAVEN. I can’t even front, I was scared as hell, but the nurses are great. They placed him on a pillow on my lap before allowing me to lift him and place him on my chest. They covered him with warm blankets and there we sat for about 30 minutes. They even gave me a mirror so that I could watch his little face as he lay there. I did my best to breathe deeply so I could show him how it’s done. I’m certain it had no effect at all, but it was nice to think i was providing him with some inspiration 🙂
I also wanted to use my first incidence of skin-to-skin contact to bond with him… to sing him a soothing song… and then today I realized that I don’t really know any nursery rhyme type songs. I thought and thought about an appropriate tune to hum and came up blank… and then *this* song popped up… and this is the first tune I hummed for the young one:
Clearly I need to do better…
So far his papa and i have both checked his temperature and changed a diaper. It’s amazing how much care someone so small requires, but like the nurse said, if you can do it while he’s this size, you’ll never have a problem. So I suppose we’re making progress too.
We have this one amazing nurse who tends to work the evening shift. Yesterday she took us to meet another baby in the NICU. This little girl started off like Stephen at 24 weeks. She looked like a giant! She was 40 weeks and alllll baby. I have no idea how they can grow them that big, but there she was. It was so amazing to be able to look and see what is in store for Stephen. When dealing with such a small guy, it’s hard to imagine that he will ever be “normal size” but slowly but surely I am certain we are headed in that direction. Needless to say, I can’t wait.
Gangsta Mittens 
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