What can I say, been slacking on my duty to keep you all informed.
First off, howdy cousins / aunts / uncles / nieces / nephews / parents / brothers / sisters / etc! Amazing how quickly the word spread around about this lil’ site of mine – guess I’ll have to forego all those ‘check out my crazy relative’ posts I had queued up!
Anyone, on to the matter at hand:
Most importantly, the new dad’s doing just fine! 😉
Mom is still sore now and then, but after watching what she had to go through, I’m shocked how quickly the human body can recover. Let me just say this right off: thank god I’m an outtie – hats off to all you mothers out there! Other than that, she’s getting around very well. Had her two week doctor’s visit, and was given a clean bill of health.
Toby is doing wonderful. Hell, in my opinion, amazingly. I have many many pictures that need a bit of editing before I throw them up here – they’re all extremely large and in need of color & lighting corrections. So check back in a couple and I’ll try to get a gallery of them up. Health-wise, he’s made several big steps:
* Only complication noted so far: apparently he may have a fracture on his left leg, caused during his birth. (Will have to write up the birth story sometime soon for you all; it’s a good one!) Neither the doctor nor the orthopedic specialist that saw him seem particularly concerned about it at this point though. It certainly isn’t a high priority at this point anyways.
* Mentioned a couple posts back that he was off the ventilator and onto something called a CPAP. That’s long gone (lasted _maybe_ all of one day). That was initially replaced by a pair of small tubes in his nostrils that just gave him extra air volume. And today when we stopped by for our daily gazing, that was replaced by *_nothing_*! Yep, that’s right, Tobias is breathing just fine, entirely unassisted.
* The IV in his umbilical cord was removed several days ago, replaced by an IV on his right arm. Today, the IV on his right arm was replaced by *_nothing_*!
* Those IVs were supplying him with several medications along with all his nutrition. So them being gone means a couple things. First off, that means he’s off all his intravenous medication. A good thing for sure. It also means he’s getting all his nutrition from mom. As of now, he’s still getting being fed via tube through his nose to his stomach (which he just absolutely adored getting reinserted this afternoon – NOT!), but they’ve been altering the timing of how he takes in the milk the last several days. They started with a tiny constant trickle at first to get his stomach functioning, which eventually became a fairly large constant trickle. Today, he’s on what they call “bolus”:https://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=bolus feeding, which is essentially like having a meal, then nothing for a couple hours, then another meal, then nothing for another couple hours, etc. Basically, preparing his digestion for being fed normally.
* He’s been off and on the bilirubin lights a couple times. Nothing out of the ordinary apparently.
* This evening he had his first bath, and we almost missed it! We went out to grab something to eat, and came back just in time. Too damn cute, and he seemed to enjoy it – or at least, he didn’t seem _not_ to enjoy it anyway! Of course, my rechargeable camera batteries (all three of them) were dead, so the naked baby pictures will have to come later… 🙂
* Up until the last few days, we’ve seen just the briefest glimpses of his eyes; either he was under the bili lights and wearing his sleeping mask, or was sound asleep – just the occasional peek. The last two days he’s been looking around fairly often – especially after his bath! Big blue eyes staring back at us (or at least in our general direction). I’m not sure about this, but I a seem to believe that all newborns have blue eyes initially (could be wrong; can’t remember where I picked up that tidbit of info), so his _true_ eye color is just a guess right now.
* Oh, and he’s been held several times by mom & dad. 🙂
That’s about all I can think of at the moment – getting very late (early), so that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll try to update this a little more often for those of you interested – plus, it might make a mildly interesting chronology later for someone.