he'll be comin around the mountain when he comes...

it's been quite some time since the last post and for that we are sorry. we had to move due to our rental being short sold and so we have been scrambling over the past month to find a new home. as God would have it, He provided a great new place for us to live in and it all came together in the last hour as we finalized everything with some good friends of ours about 10 days before we had to be out of our old place! they are looking to buy a new home and they suggested out of the blue "why don't you rent our place?" well...we took them up on it and everyone kicked it into high gear to make it happen in record time. we began painting their whole place (tri level home) on thursday, july 22nd and worked late into saturday night while tracee ran off for gavin's baby shower that was hosted at some of our wonderful friend's home. last sunday we gathered some troops and rented a u-haul and got everything moved over and in. the good news is that our new place is only 5 minutes from our old one and it keeps us in the same basic area which we love! the bad news was that it was 111 out and humid so we were just getting killed all weekend.  since then it has been non-stop with projects all over the place to get things in order!  both tracee and i have been working tirelessly to make this new house a home and by gosh i think we are actually getting there.
in the midst of all of this, i continue to go to work and we continue to make our trek over to the hospital to see gavin. this thursday will be 4 months since he was born. let that sink in for a minute...4 months of visit after visit and hour after hour spent at the hospital to be with our precious baby boy. tracee and i determined we have put over 10,000 miles on our car just in trips to the hospital and back.  WE NEED A VACATION!!
gavin is doing awesome - he is now 6 pounds 15 ounces and taking over 2/3 of his daily feeds from the bottle. he is getting 60mL's of food every 3 hours and they are still pumping him full of 30cal food (rocket fuel) to help him continue to grow due to the fact that he expends sooo much energy to breathe!  since we wrote last gavin has moved completely off of CPAP and gone to the high-flow canula where he has been getting high pressure oxygen through the little prongs in his nose. this has been so exciting for us because he has absolutely loved being off of CPAP...he hated that mask! he is a much happier baby now and spends most of his time eating, sleeping and breathing...although he does find some time to play with us! he is almost 42 weeks now so he's a mature baby :-). gavin started at 4 liters of oxygen and has been weaned all the way down to 2.5 liters with continued changes on the way.
we ask for your diligent prayers to continue for his eyes as we need them to be fully vascularized. because he is on oxygen and won't come home on blended oxygen (like he gets in the NICU) they will have to switch him to 100% at a lower flow and that can mess with his blood vessels in his eyes if he isn't fully vascularized.  so....it's very important to us because we aren't sure if we can bring him home unless his eyes get to where they need to be and that's the question mark right now.
all in all, we are so pleased with gavin's progress and we thank and praise God for what He has done and how much He has healed gavin over his short, but eventful, little life. he is such a fighter and we can't wait to show him off to everybody we see - especially our faithful prayer warrior friends!!

jeramy