Baby Shook 3.0: October 8 (Day 23) - Julia is coming home today!

Julia made it through Sunday night's feeding with an intake of 298. Not quite 300, but close enough :) After her first morning feeding, I sent her back to the NICU and got ready for the day. I decided to get the room in order a little bit just in case she was able to come home today. The nurses and doctor had said originally that it would be Monday, but then they changed to Tuesday because we were going to need training on a monitor Julia was going to go home on. After breakfast and getting ready, I headed back into the NICU and talked with Julia's nurse for the day. The doctor had done rounds (a new to us doctor - they do a weekly rotation so today was the beginning of a new doctor) and he said he didn't think Julia needed to go home on the monitor. So our nurse told me that Julia would be able to go home today, but not until the doctor's orders went through and we had some discharge stuff to do.

I fed Julia for around 11:00 and then took her and her car seat back into the NICU. She had to do a car seat test where she sat in her car seat for 1 hour hooked up to a monitor to make sure her oxygen levels stayed high enough. While Julia was doing that test, I headed back to our house to take a few things back and have lunch with Kathy and the boys. After lunch, I went back to the hospital and Julia had passed her car seat test- 1 step closer to going home. She also had her hearing screening done today and she passed that right away. I worked on a little more of the paperwork that needed to be done with the nurse. After that, I headed back to the rooming out room with Julia and we hung out waiting to go home. I called Kathy to let her know to be on stand by to come and pick us up. I kept thinking it would be soon, but it took forever.

Around 3:30, the doctor came in and did Julia's final assessment. Then Julia and I hung out for a little while. Julia's nurse came in and said it would probably be a little while because the doctor had to do final assessments on 6 other babies that were going home today and then he needed to put orders in on all of them. I asked if it would take at least 30 minutes and she said yes. So I ended up taking home all of Julia's things other than her car seat so we had less to deal with when it was time to go. I ran stuff home and hung out with Kathy and the boys for a few minutes. They actually ended up walking me back to the hospital. I went back into the NICU and got Julia and we went back and hung out in our room for a little while longer. Her nurse came in around 5:00 and said we could do the final discharge. We looked over Julia's discharge papers and then I loaded her up into her car seat. The nurse got a wagon to pull Julia out in and I called Kathy to tell her to load the boys up and come get us. We walked out and met Kathy and loaded up and headed home.

Oliver and Parker were excited to see Julia and have her home. We ordered pizza for supper so that we didn't have to make anything. Julia was very good and just hung out while we ate our pizza. Eric got home around 8:30 that night-we were bummed that he wasn't able to be with us on her release day, but he was happy to see her when he got home. Kathy gave the boys baths and we got Julia all snuggled in for the night.