Somehow didn't get to this last night, so I'll tackle it first thing this morning here on Monday. Zac had a good day yesterday, though not quite as aggressive with his feedings as he had been. Mostly, he was just too tired to take the bottle as much. We arrived after lunch and they had fed him through his tube because when they checked on him at noon, he was just sound asleep and they didn't want to wear him out further.
At 3pm, he took the bottle just fine, but at 6 he only took a little bit before having to accept the rest via the tube. I'm pretty sure that at 6pm he would've been just fine except the nurse wanted us to bathe him before letting him eat. That turned out to be the problem, because he actually woke up at 5:10 and by the time his bottle was ready at 6:05, he was fading fast. :) So in the future, we won't let them give him a bath prior to his feeding. I think it'd be just fine if he half-slept through a bath anyway at this point as taking the food from the bottle is more important.
We did have a good talk with his nurse of the past two days, Pam, about how the babies generally take to the bottle. Her experience has shown her that generally babies don't go home before they reach what would've originally been 36 weeks of age/gestation. That means we're looking at a little less than 2 weeks for Zac, which is in line with what we were told last week early. But, she said, it depends on how quickly he makes this next transition. She said normally it's like the babies wake up one day and suddenly they're ready to take every feeding by bottle and they do it extremely well. This would be similar to last week when Zac, suddenly mid-day decided he was ready to try it. It was a dramatic change and obvious to us, so now we know what to look for moving forward. If he reaches this point sooner, they won't keep him just for the sake of keeping him.
He also does need to stop having apnea and bradycardia episodes, of which he's had several the past few days. Generally these are focused around when he's just beginning to eat (where he is so hungry he gulps his food and then his heart rate drops) or when he needs to, excuse the language, poop. :) Sometimes that effort, that little red face we're all so used to when babies are trying to get that out, that causes his rate to drop a bit in one way or another. The heart rate episodes are the bradys and when his breathing rate drops, those are the apnea episodes. He doesn't have as many of those at this time as he does the ones where his heart rate drops. No cause for alarm, though. :) He comes out of them just fine and is not at all in danger of anything. It's just a normal thing in premature babies and I'd venture a guess to say it's fairly normal for probably plenty of babies early on; we just don't know it because those babies aren't hooked into monitoring devices all the time. :)
So that's the update for Sunday. I'll put one out later today as well. Oh yes, and he's now 5 lbs., 3 oz., so he's gaining weight at about the rate of an ounce a day, which is good.
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