moving right along

Charlie time seems to be picking up steam - somewhat. His drip feeds are going great. They are up to 17mls per hour and are increasing it by 1 ml 3 times a day. Yesterday he said "So long!" to his IV nutrition (TPN and lipids) and traded in for a dextrose drip with the added couple of things he still needs. His total for fluids needed is 30 mls per hour, so he is getting more than half from the breast milk drip now! This is so good and Dr. Bode feels so confident in Charlie's progress that her plan is to remove his PICC line tomorrow and have him just on the feeding drip. Getting rid of the PICC line is good for avoiding any possible infection that could come from it, but makes me a little nervous in case they need a line again. We trust Dr. Bode though!

I wish I could say that his bottle feedings were going just as well, but they are not going at all really. He is supposed to be trying 2 feedings a day, 5 mls each. He is still randomly spitting though (not related to the feedings, just mucous). So, if he spits around a feeding time, we have not been trying the bottle at that time. If he is sleeping during a feeding time, we do not wake him to try. So, needless to say, he has not tried much. We have not managed to get 2 feeds in one day yet. But we keep hoping that it we will start to make some progress soon! We keep telling him to watch Baby K who takes her bottle like a champ and is doing fantastic with feedings (slow and steady!!). Hopefully he will follow her example so he can be rid of the tube up his nose! Or maybe he will still be sporting the tube when he brings Baby K to the prom in 16 years! :-)