eric celebrated his 10 week birthday by quickly ditching his isolette after only 9 days and moving on to an open, unheated bassinet! the open bed is the very last stop before graduating from the nicu – yippee!

eric’s caregivers don’t want him to spend too money calories keeping warm so they take great care to make sure that he’s really bundled in blankets. he seemed to be holding his temperature quite well during the day, so i think he’ll manage the transition well as long as we keep him swaddled.

it’s not uncommon for micropreemies to reflux their food which can cause them to stop breathing, or even worse, the refluxed food can get into their lungs and cause all sorts of problems.

we’ve noticed that most of eric’s “desatting” ( lowering of blood oxygen ) and bradycardias ( dangerous lowering of heart rate ) occur after feeding, which means that he might be starting to show signs of mild reflux; to help relieve the condition, they’ve started to give him zantac to reduce the reflux and reglan to help move things along more quickly. if the meds work as intended, the doctors might not need to give him a round of pulmicort, since much of his need for supplemental oxygen seems to be related to reflux.

nurse nancy leaves us a not so subtle note to remind us to not forget to take our infant cpr class on wednesday. really, she’s telling us not to wait until the following wednesday because we’ll likely be getting too close to eric’s release day.

in addition to the yellow “live strong” armbands, we received dozens and dozens of blank “live strong” postcards, which i decided to plaster all over his new bassinet.

this is only a small portion of the bed that’s covered, but i thought it was the best shot.

after two months of enduring this kind of behavior from me, the nurses have learned to stop asking why.

eric’s nurse is fiddling with his nasal cannula, which is why he has the plastic “blow by” tube in his face that is gently wafting oxygen towards his nose and mouth.

it’s close to feeding time and he decides that he very much wants to suck on kris’ finger while he waits for food.

eric’s nurses turned down his nasal cannula “flow” to 0.5 liters per minute, which is way down from the starting point of 2.0 liters per minute. when the flow gets to 0 liters per minute, he’ll be able to be rid of the nasal cannula entirely.

as if to prove a point, he kept ripping the nasal cannula out of his nose and staring at us. he did this over and over and it was hard to not interpret the action as his way of saying that he was ready to be free of supplemental oxygen.

his blood oxygen levels looked so great that his nurse decided to take his nasal cannula off for two 20 minute periods while watching his stats. he did great so i suspect that he’ll be off oxygen support much sooner than later, if the reflux meds work properly.

woohoo! in addition to everything else, eric hit the four pound milestone on his ten week birthday! somehow, i managed to not get his entire raised fist in the frame. hi. ho.

it’s hard to imagine that a mere three weeks ago we were celebrating him hitting three pounds. hooray for eric!

eric decided to celebrate all the big achievements by drinking his 9 p.m. bottle in four minutes. i’m not joking. i guess there’s no doubt that he’s got the bottle feeding thing down.

is it just me or does it seem like his custom knit cap is getting a lot more snug than it was just three weeks ago?