Tuesday, September 25 (Day 10)

Today Julia went to radiology to have a cookie swallow study done (Sara tells me that is what it is called).  Unprecedented for a female Steffen, Julia managed to fail the cookie swallow study.  She didn't really fail it, but the speech pathologist said that during the study she didn't see the same signs of stress as she saw in other feedings so it was not really an accurate test.  However, the good news is that the speech pathologist did not see anything abnormal (e.g. she is not aspirating milk into her lungs while she eats) so that is good news.  She will stop by again tomorrow to watch Julia bottle feed and will potentially give some more recommendations.  Julia has been upped from 0 bottle feedings to 1-2 bottle feedings during the day, but no bottle feedings at night so that she is able to rest.  Sara can feed her whenever she is up at the hospital as the speech pathologist said that breastfeeding should not be as stressful as the bottle.  She emphasized that Julia should only associate positive things with eating and that we shouldn't force anything right now and make her associate eating as being a negative experience.

In other news, Julia ate a whopping 1 ml while Sara was feeding her for her 2:00 feeding.  This was slightly discouraging, because it seems like Julia is regressing a bit in terms of how much she eats.  We went back home after this feeding, spent some time with the boys, Coco, and Kelli.  Coco and Kelli took the boys to the play area in the mall - they seemed to be excited that they were able to play there and it probably helped for them to burn some of their energy there also.  After the boys went to bed we went shopping for a little bit and bought some new outfits for Julia. The 3 that we have been sending to the NICU all managed to get blood or something else on them so she was wearing a hospital outfit when we left.  Our little girl, being not so little for a NICU baby at 9 pounds, outgrew newborn sizes after wearing her one newborn outfit 2 times, so we bought a few more sleepers for her so that she can be in her own clothes while spending time in the NICU - this is just something small that we are able to do for her, even though she probably doesn't care :).

The boys taking their bath today so they didn't join the "Stinkiest" Geotrax team (Oliver thought that was funny).  They were driving the trains along the edge of the tub making train engine sounds, which they enjoyed.  

Julia wide awake after zonking out for her 2:00 feeding.