a little bit of everything

gavin finished his third round of steroids twelve days ago and he has pretty much been able to maintain his ventilator settings. they have been able to ween some of his settings on the ventilator and our hope as that with each day, he can put on more weight and move closer and closer to being on c pap. he is still tolerating his feeds, getting 27 ml every 3 hours. it takes him an hour and a half to eat all of that so he basically just eats all day. no wonder he is growing! he now weighs 2 lbs. 11 ounces. in addition to tolerating his feeds, they stopped his morphine, which he was only getting once every 24 hours. so now, he only has his e.t. tube and his feeding tube. there are no iv's, no picc lines...NOTHING in his little body. we love that. they are drawing occasional blood gases so he does get pricked every now and then but not nearly as often as he was before!

gavin is so alert. when we talk to him, he looks our direction and will open his eyes. we love that. it definitely makes us feel more connected. the eye doctor came in to look at his eyes since premature babies' retinas aren't attached. he checked to see if the blood vessels are making their way toward the eye. the vessels haven't reached yet, but as of his first check, it doesn't appear that anything is abnormal. the eye doctor will check him every 2 weeks to see how the vessels are progressing and to check for abnormalities.

another step we have coming up will be moving gavin to an open crib from his incubator. there are a variety of things that the doctors like to see happen before this occurs. they like the babies to be about 1800 grams (gavin is about 1200), be able to regulate their body temperature (which gavin is pretty much doing...), and they prefer that they are off of the ventilator. we obviously don't want to push any of these steps with gavin since he is progressing so well. they are beginning to pull back the blanket on top of his incubator so that gavin can begin to adjust to day/night. this is super exciting to us....steps forward indeed! another reason that we don't want to push him into an open crib too soon (not that it's up to us anyway :-) is that gavin is still very sensitive to noise and when he is outside of the incubator/has the cover off (which helps muffle sound), he tends to de-sat and require more support. the more mature he gets, the better that will be.

we are extremely pleased with gavin's overall health. he is getting so big!! he still is occasionally having his breathing episodes (bronchial spasms) where he needs to be bagged. those are extremely scary for us. also, he extubated himself the other night 2 or 3 times. please pray that he keeps his tube in and that his lungs continue to heal and get stronger and stronger, which will help him with the bradys and the spasms.

thank you so much for all of your prayers and support, as always. i cannot stress enough how blessed we feel...

Great is His FAITHFULNESS!