The Homestretch

We've had a wonderful few days with the boys. They've both reached several milestones in their journey home. Just today our Dr. recommended that Caleb should switch to bottle feeding every meal and Matthew to bottle feed two out of every three feeds. The Dr. made it sound like the boys are rounding third and headed home. Just like in baseball, just because you are headed home doesn't mean you always get there. You could get thrown out at the plate, you could pull a muscle, the shortstop might cut the throw and gun down the over agressive baserunner who was trying to stretch a single into a double before you cross homeplate. In baby terms, they could relapse into apnea spells, they could resist bottle feeding that much and get switched back to 2 bottle feeds per day, or they might not be able to be able to maintain their temperature.

The boys are both still in the isolettes (because there are no cribs available) but they are shut off so they are regulating their temperature completely on their own. This, along with increasing their bottle feeds, will cause them to burn more calories than they have been in the last two weeks so hopefully they will be able to continue getting fatter. In regards to their fatness, Caleb is now 5 lbs 15 ounces and Matthew is 5 lbs 13 ounces. Caleb started slow, but is surging ahead in the race to 6 lbs!!

The nurse practioner noticed a heart murmur on Matthew yesterday and ordered a heart echo. This was a little troublesome for us because Matthew is not the son with the heart issues. But the Dr. called today and told us that his heart looks perfect and his echo was normal. Praise the Lord!!

Caleb had the bolster monitor on that records every heart beat for 24 hours and that ended at 8:00am this morning. It normally takes a few days to get the results back because there are a lot of heart beats over 24 hours (to the tune of 200,000!!).

Emily and I got our first chance to bathe the boys last night. Our nurse told us ahead of time that she adopts a "baptism by fire" strategy when teaching parents how to bathe their kids. We are both pretty slow learners so I think she should have modified her strategy. She put the two bath tubs (they might not be called bath tubs when they are for kids???) together so that we could learn from each other while we bathed simultaneously...bad decision. Instead of watching what we were doing, we kept looking to see what the other person was doing. This resulted in Emily knocking over her cup of rinse water, the nurse telling daddy that the water is supposed to go on the child, not on my shorts, and two screaming urine soaked babies. I don't think it is supposed to take 45 minutes to bath a child, but in the end, we had two somewhat clean babies!!

Caleb is already in work clothes - "Glendarroch Homes" onesie..thanks Grandma GiGi

Raise your hand if you hate bath time.

Daddy got to wash Caleb's hair for the first time.

GrandMary got the twinkers each these "I'm the Favorite" outfits!!

More family portraits...Matthew was completely unplugged for this one.

Go Frogs!! Emily took this picture and coincidentally you can't read TCU very well.