Last night, Colin threw the mother of all temper tantrums. And it proved how far he has come in the past few days (thanks, we’re sure, to the steroid treatment) because through the entire tantrum, he stayed stable.
John and I switched visiting schedules yesterday — he took the morning visit and I went over in the evening. This was nice because both babies tend to be awake and alert after the evening shift changes. The nurses do a full assessment of the babies at 7:30, and this wakes them up.
I took advantage of this, after giving Veronica her bottle for the evening shift, by holding Colin. This past week, we have faced the opposite problem with holding Colin: he has been too peaceful to disturb. Since he was awake and moving around already, I pounced and asked if I could hold him.
Colin settled in quickly and soon got very comfortable and fell asleep. After an hour, it was time for me to put him back in his bed. We had to wake him up to do this, and this triggered the tantrum. He raged and cried and tried to pull his respirator tube out. And I stood there and held his hands and his head and tried to talk him down. It took more than half an hour, but I finally succeeded in calming him down enough that he fell asleep. I hope he stayed that way.
Colin is also now off the IV and taking all his nutrition from the breast milk. He is up to 5 ml every hour, without any fortification. The doctor wants to continue to move very slowly with the feeding, since we’ve run into problems in the past when we’ve made a jump. His nurse also was able to lower his ventilator settings again yesterday.
So for both babies, and their parents and big brother, this has been a pretty good weekend so far.
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