A Few Days Home

We are home for a few days. Tyler is doing extremely well. He just needs a whiff of oxygen and is on lowest setting on low-flow. The only reason he is still on it right now is he still swings his oxygen saturations. The connection to an oxygen source allows us to give him some oxygen when he needs a little help coming out of a desaturation. He is feeding well and on Friday weighed in at 4 pounds and 13 ounces. He has had a few very good nursing visits. Again, he is surpassing every one's expectations on how well he has been able to nurse. The suck, swallow, breath combination is extremely tough to figure out and most preemies don't start to figure that out until 34-36 weeks gestational age. Tyler was 34 weeks last Tuesday and doesn't drown himself when nursing. We had a couple of visits that we felt he got a large amount of milk while nursing so we took some milk out of his nasal tube feed so he wouldn't get over stuffed. So despite his head pressure, Tyler is making some real progress.


We have seen quite a few alert times with Tyler. His eyes open up large and he quietly takes in the world around him. He still keeps very close tabs on where Daddy is. He really responds to Ben's voice and likes to watch him. The nurses have told us they have seen longer alert times over this week. We believe he sleeps a lot because of the pressures in his head. So it is great to hear that Tyler is spending more of his time awake.

This picture actually shows the swelling of his head. His forehead and the top front of his head is were all the fluid is pushing up the fontenel. They tell us his forehead will be less puffy once the fluid has been drained out. This picture also shows how well his face is filling out and a baby double chin is starting to form. The butt cheeks are still missing, but the thighs are also plumping up. When I hold him, he feels heavy like a baby now.

This is a normal picture of Tyler's favorite pose for the ultrasound pictures we have. We have a shot of him with his hands covering his face from every ultrasound I had. This was how he responded as we said "see you later" before coming home.