In and Out

I bet you are wondering how little Miss Ellie has been doing since last time. Well we were too. We found out that at the midnight feeding (Notice we were home before the midnight feeding started. That should count for something.) Ellie took her whole bottle. In fact she took her whole bottle again at the 3 am feeding. The nurse's main concern was that she thought Ellie might be working on a poop. By the way, these were 57 mL bottles because of her weight gain yesterday.

Next up was her car seat trial. She started at 4 am and stayed in there until 5:25 am. She did wonderfully. By the way the hospital doesn't recommend putting anything under the baby or on the straps unless it came with the car seat. But they do say it's okay to put some rolled up blankets beside them to keep them from slouching. And they say a blanket on top is fine too. Oh, you can see the rest of our car seat here. By 6 am she still hadn't stooled. She barely had a smear yesterday and I think that last real stool she had was last Wednesday. She didn't finish her 6 am feeding, she had 20 mL fed to her through the feeding tube. But then at 9 am she did finish her bottle. She took about 30 minutes to finish that bottle which is the time limit given her. Apparently studies have shown that if you keep them on the bottle for more than half an hour they actually use more calories than they get from the bottle. (I'm not sure if that applies to healthy full term kids.) Then came the enema (before the noon feeding). It worked. She had a stool weighing 158 grams! Then she had another one weighing 56 grams! (Compare that to an average weight gain of around 20 grams per day.) It was army green and army sized. Yes, the enema worked. I think we'd better brace ourselves for a weight loss today. In case you're wondering she went through four diapers. After the giant stools her tummy felt much softer and she sucked down her noon bottle in 15 minutes! At 3 pm we're probably going to try breastfeeding again. She didn't finish her 6 am feeding so we don't think breastfeeding is keeping her here at this point. I'm eager to see how she will do with empty intestines. We should be careful not to have too high of expectations though. You just never know what this little girl is going to do.