Happy Dirthday!

Today is Tyler's due date. He has been out and about for just under 3 months now. After his surgery last week he is doing much better. He was eating 300 CCs on a good day. Today we will be lucky if takes less than 600 CCs. His awake and alert times are longer and more plentiful. We are seeing no signs of respiratory issues anymore. The only down side at this point is that he does not sleep as well at night as he used to. We suspect that it may be too quiet for him in our room. A NICU may not be the best place to learn to sleep...

Up to this point Tyler's age was stated in terms of gestational age. He was born at 28 and 3/7 weeks Today would have been 40 weeks and 0/7 but it is also day 0 of life. Preemies get to have 2 ages. His actual age which is 3 months and his corrected age which today became 0 days. We're told that some of his developmental milestones will occur at the expected real age and some on the corrected age. Thought they cannot tell us which events to expect when. At 2 years old (I'm not sure which scale) development is said to begin to match that of any other 2 year old so we can drop the second age.

Lately Rachel has been on a Birthday kick. She has a "Birthday Set" consisting of a wooden cake, velcro on candles try and serving spatula. I think it is safe to say we have had at least 50 birthday partys this past week. She will assemble her cake set it in front of the guest of honor. Bring over everyone she can find (stuffed and otherwise), and sing "Happy Dirthday" while dancing around the cake in Ring Around the Rosey style until it's time to blow out the candles and serve the cake. The she will re-assemble the cake and start all over again.

Tonight we had our weekly gathering at my parent's house. We had been thinking about doing something special on Tyler's due date. Tonight turned out to be a special treat for Rachel, a real live Dirthday party with presents, cake and even candles.