So Far Behind

Well, life has gotten a little crazy over the last month since my last posting. Here are a few updates:

First and foremost we welcomed our 3rd child and 2nd daughter into our beautiful and amazing family on June 22, 2010. She weighed 6 pounds, 8 ounces of perfection!!!

It was a very easy entrance as compared to the other two, but then she decided to go and stop breathing on us! The day after she was born she was sleeping in her cart and started making some noise. My mom picked her up and she started making some weird noises. Then I realized that she was beginning to turn blue and not breathing. My mom ran out of the room and luckily right outise of our door was the nursery nurse. She ran in, grabbed Maizy, and ran out. She came back a little while later and said that she had a lot of mucus balls in her airway. She sucked them out and said there was one more she couldn't get so she would give her some formula to try to get her to swallow it down. Great! Then she came back to our room. At 3pm, they came to get her for her 24 hour PKU test. While she was down in the nursery for this, she stopped breathing again. This time they hooked her up to the pulse ox machine and all sorts of other monitors, had her in a little incubator and took her down to NICU. We were able to visit with her down there and feed her every three hours. She was also very jaundice so they put her under the lights. She had some really cool shades on:

She behaved herself in the NICU so the next morning they moved her to the special care nursery. She was still hooked up to all kinds of monitors, but didn't need the one on one care. I was discharged from the hospital that night and we had to leave our room by midnight, but Maizy had to stay. I could not envision myself walking out the door without her soooooooo.....we stayed in the lobby. Literally, we slept on the "couches" in the lobby. And I use the term "sleep" very loosely because every three hours I had to go upstairs to feed her so we were only in the lobby for about 2 hours at a time. But unfortunately at her 2am feeding, she started dropping her oxygen levels while eating. We thought it was maybe positioning, but she did it again at 8am. So she had to stay another night to monitor her eating behaviors. We think the problem was that she only had the suck-swallow part of the suck-swallow-breathe cycle. Luckily the neonatologist took pity on us and let us stay in the "Nesting Room" that night. Basically, in the special care nursery, the babies there all need monitoring for some time so this is a room where parents can stay with their babies as a trial run before taking them home. They are still monitored, but the parents are responsible for caring for them rather than the nurses. Here we are with Maizy in her cart in the background and Ben on the so called bed:

Finally, we got to come home!!!! Maizy could not have a happier brother and sister!!!!

Welcome to our family, Maizy Daniella!!!!