So to kind of rewind on Sienna, mostly for my own record and memory is after the dye test, things really took off for Sienna. We could now try giving her a bottle because nothing would leak out. Sienna loved the taste of breast milk. She could only have 5 mls to start off because despite being 2 weeks old, her stomach was still the size of a pea cause no food had ever gone inside. One night I called the nurses to see how she had been doing with bottle feeding and was told that she had been doing good but was really fussy because she wanted more then they were allowed to give her so they were hoping the Dr's would give them the okay tomorrow to up her dosage because she was ready and wanted it. The goal was to get her to 150 mls which she eventually did, but some of it came thru the bottle and the rest was given thru the tube in her nose. After she reached that we were allowed to try breast feeding. But because of being given milk thru a bottle and a tube she had gotten kind of lazy and would tire really fast and then give up completely. On Thursday we were told that the feeding tube could be taken out the next day and if it went well with her eating from a bottle or breast feeding we could go home on Saturday! That was huge news because we were told to expect her to be in the hospital for about 2 months based on an average. Least amount of time would be a month, longest 3 months. So when we got told it could be saturday, we were ecstatic because we had only been there for not even 2 and a half weeks. It was also a blessing cause matts mom was going to be leaving in just over a week and really wanted to see the baby blessed, but the NICU was on lockdown to help prevent the babies from getting the measles or the flu so only moms and dads could come in and see them.
But then Saturday came and Sienna had not been gaining any weight. So it became not today but tomorrow. And then tomorrow came and the answer was the same as the day before. And I was starting to get really emotional and frustrated because I felt like we were never going to leave and that we'd be taking steps backwards because we would have to put back in the feeding tube and IV's so that she would get the nutrients that she needed. I just wanted my baby home.
On Monday she was still losing weight so the dr's decided that we should try supplementing a bottle of my milk to give her extirpate calories and if she gained weight by doing that then we could be leaving on Wednesday. That was encouraging but almost frustrating as we'll cause my thoughts were, she hasn't been gaining weight for the last 6 days... Why did you not think of doing this sooner! I am sure they wanted to see her gain the weight in her own but this seemed like such an easy solution I wish we had tried it sooner so we could have left sooner. But the great news is, the supplement worked and on Tuesday (May 6) they told us we could take her home! Oh I have never smiled so much and so big as I did on that day. We didn't tell our parents cause we wanted to surprise them. We also wanted to stay a little longer at the Ronald McDonald house was a few reasons. 1) we wanted a nice dinner before we left and 2) we had signed up for free haircuts that night and didn't want to miss out on that opportunity.
So we got sienna out of the hospital at about 400, went home and napped, showed her off during dinner, had one of the best dinners there in the 2 weeks we stayed and got our hair cut.
It was so much fun surprising our parents. It was about 11:00 pm when we got in, so we were pretty exhausted but we still wanted to surprise them. Matt's mom was staying at mine and Matt's place so we went to pick her up first and then go to my parents. When she saw the car there I don't think it quite registered to her that Sienna was in the car until Matt told her there was a baby in there and she needed to put her shoes on. Her smile got so big and she looked like a little kid at Christmas. We snuck into the house my parents were house sitting at the time and told them that we had someone here who wanted to see them. They got so excited. It was so tender to see our parents hovering over Sienna, oohing and awing over how beautiful she was. It was such a beautiful moment and worth the wait.
We have loved having Sienna home. She is the sweetest baby. She sleeps pretty good at night, like 4-5 hours at a time. She gets held and snuggled all day long so she is becoming a little conditioned to being held, a habit we will have to try and break if we ever want to get anything done again! But we lover her so much and couldn't be happier.
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