Two Weeks Home!

Hello, Kiera Groupies! I have had many comments on how I have not updated the blog recently, so I am taking a moment to live up to the blogger committment. :) I appreciate that some many of you keep up with her progress and want to honor my end of the bargain. We have had a very busy two weeks at home, and finding time to blog has been difficult since that time is better spent sleeping.

It has felt so peaceful just to finally have her in our home that the great amount of work she entails still seems less stressful than 514 consecutive trips to the hospital. It was nice to just see her sitting on OUR COUCH! WOW! :) We are enjoying the simple pleasures. I have intermittent nursing at the moment, an average of about 3 days a week with nursing, although this week I'm only covered Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning and next week I have 4 days covered. The nursing helps since I can't take Kiera in a car unless I have 1 other trained care giver with me to sit in the back with Kiera in case she disconnects from her vent, needs suctioning or bagging, or whatever other crises might arise. When nurses are here I can run to the bank, grocery store, take a nap, shower, go to the restroom, or whatnot. It's tricky to do simple things sometimes because Murphy's Law is correct, and the minute I leave the room, even if Kiera is sleeping, you know she will roll or kick and accidentally disconnect her ventilator. Last Thursday I had a 2 hour shopping spree to Other Mothers and Smith's, and it was heaven! Daddy watched her Saturday, and I had the most fun browsing for 2 hours at Lowe's, Target, and Babies R Us.

Kiera gets meds, food, or breathing treatments every 3 hours, and just when you are finished with one feeding it seems the next one is starting. Her feedings are spread over two hours and start every 3 so she is usually beginning a feed, in the middle of one, or finishing it at any given time. She has significantly fewer medications now than before, but there are still quite a few prescriptions to keep track of. She is rolling more than when she was in the hospital and is adjusting remarkably well to being in our home and not the hospital room she has called home for the last 17 months. She seems so calm and happy even though her environment has had a complete makeover. She loves to look around her bedroom every morning when she wakes up, and has a definite routine established. Many hospitalized babies can't sleep when they get home because it's too quiet or too dark, but she seems fine, probably because Jer and I were her constants in the hospital, and maybe those pictures of her home helped.

We have made some headway in the baby food department which took some doing on my part. For the last few weeks she wanted nothing to do with any spoons being put in her mouth no matter what they had on them. I was starting to worry she'd never eat since it seemed like such a set back from the positive steps we were making in Houston. In the last few days I've been able to feed her a few teaspoons of food a day while her cuff is deflated. I had to coax her by holding my Fresca can to her mouth and then giving a straw siphon of Fresca which reminded her of sharing tastes of my Sprite in the hospital. Then I gave her a straw of nectarized cranberry juice followed by some baby food (vegetable chicken is one of her favorites) on the straw. Then we moved to the spoon, and she's done great since! We feed her some tastes once a day while we eat breakfast and follow that with a good bath or she smells like baby food all day. There's nothing like the smell of chicken baby food in your baby's hair. :)

I guess that's all for now. I have a Lasagna to pull from the oven, and a feeding to start. Kiera is playing on the floor with her doll house and stacking cups. She's reaching for them and testing the limits of the length of her ventilator connection. Hmmm...

Love,
Therese