Everyone is Doing Well

Here's the latest...

Everyone is doing well. Mom and I are home and trying to recover. Parker is still in NICU and will be for at least another day, maybe a few more. His blood sugar levels seem to be fine, but they need to ween him off the IV that is keeping those levels up. Hopefully his body starts to produce enough sugar on its own soon. The really bad thing is that they have to keep changing the location of his IV. So last night and this morning it was in his foot as you can see from the photo below.

We visited Parker several times last night and this morning. The picture below is of mom and Parker before an attempted bottle feeding.

The other thing that is keeping him in NICU is that he has been hard to train to accept a bottle. In fact, he has only fed from the bottle a few times. The nurses say that sometime bigger babies have a tough time adjusting to feeding that way, but they are confident that it will click with Parker in the next few days.

Of course, I am sure it is kind of hard to live your first days of life attached to all these wires and machines. The pictures below show all the sensors and tape that is on his body and the machines that he is connected to 24 hours a day.

The final time we tried to feed him a bottle, he was supposed to eat 30 mL of formula. After 10+ minutes of trying, he had only accepted 1 mL. So the nurse fed him through his feeding tube. That's right, if this kid hadn't been through enough, he had to have a tube shoved down his nose into his stomach so that he can been weened off the sugar water drip. He seems fine with it, but it just the idea that he has to endure all this and he is only two days old. You can see from the picture below that the machine with the green screen is slowly pumping the formula into his tube while he sleeps. At least he is getting his nourishment, but it will be much nicer when we can take a bottle every time.

Well, now you are caught up. Christen and I will be going to the hospital several times a day to check on Parker and try to feed him. We will keep you updated on his progress!