Better & Better

Sebastian is getting stronger every day! It is incredible to witness. He is now off of all of the machines and monitors except the respitory rate & heart rate monitors. But he ill be on those up until he is discharged. They took him off of the phototherapy on Tuesday and yesterday he was able to come off of the billiblanket for his jaundice. They need to continue to monitor his billiruben (sp???) levels, but they think that he now has it under control. We hope so!

He still has the feeding tube, and will continue to have that until he completely figures out the whole eating thing. He is trying though, and with each feeding he is getting a little better. They tell me to just have patience and that I am doing everything right, but it sure is hard to keep trying without a ton of progress being seen. Appartently the whole suckling instinct doesn't normally form until 37 weeks and since he isn't even at 36 weeks, the fact that he is doing little bits here and there is a good sign. We are just anxious to be able to have hime home so that mom & dad don;t have to go through the heart-wrenching process of leaving him every night. We are still hoping to be able to bring him home next week, so cross your fingers and say a prayer for us.

Now that he is off of the machines, we can actually hold him. And now that he has a taste of what it is like to be held, he doesn't really like being put down. He doesn't normally fuss when we put him down but he has a hilarious grimace each time he is laid back in his crib. And since we weren't able to hold him for so long, all we want to do now is hold him. Which is what I spend my days doing now. And the reason there was no blog post yesterday :-) I brought my computer thinking, I'd post something throughout the day, but with him in my arms I never got there... Anyways, here are some of the latest pics from the last 2 days.

The grimace...

On Tuesday, I went to the doc for one of my follow-ups and when I arrived back at the hospital, this was the first thing I saw. Melted my heart!

We are bringing our video camera today, so hopefully we will be able to get some of his funny faces and noises on film and be able to post that. More to come...