1st birthday countdown - devin's 2nd month...

devin's second month was much better by far than his first. things were looking up and devin began putting on weight steadily. i visited him twice a day for 3 hours or more each time. it was so difficult to just sit there and watch him through plastic. he slept for 90% of the day or more. he was still supposed to be inside of me and it was just insane to watch a plastic box and wires and tubes finish the gestational process for me. i settled into feeling ok about that fact. i wasn't overly angry about our new situation, although i did have my days. after the first month i just realized this was how it is, lets just go with it and try to make it bearable. i started bringing sweet comfort things in for devin. a stuffed lamb that was mine as a baby, soft blankets and part of his crib bedding to cover his isolette. it made me feel better and i like to think it comforted him as well. i would carry small pieces of cloth or washcloths in my shirt and bring them in to let him sleep on. babies, even tiny preemies can smell their mother very well.

i finally felt comfortable enough for friends to visit :)

by the end of the second month i got a call while i was away from the hospital. i panicked when i saw the number because its usually not good to get a call from the NICU. they told me that devin was being moved upstairs to the nursery. he didn't need to be in intensive care anymore! they needed the space for babies who did. i rushed to the hospital to check out devin's new pad and i felt like singing the alladin song "a whole new world"! it was wonderful! the babies had their own little cubicle type rooms with a nice rocker and a dresser type thing. they were spread out from each other and it was such a laid back atmosphere! downstairs was basically an open room full of alarms and critically ill babies with nurses rushing around all over. i took a deep breath that day. it felt great! after a week or so the big day came... devin was moved to a big boy crib! he needed to be able to maintain his own body temperature and he did great at it! so he got to keep his new open crib and we were able to take care of him easily and gaze upon our boy without squinting through plastic!

we were able to start offering him the bottle and i was able to let him practice breastfeeding as well. we would weigh him on a very precise digital scale before he breast fed and after to see how many ounces he took. this is his first bottle experience ever- i cant remember how many mls. he took exactly, i think something like 10! that is such a tiny amount but it was actually very good!

meanwhile, at home we were setting up his nursery. something i definitely didn't have done before being admitted at 22weeks! the only thing we had gotten actually was the wooden letters you can see on the dresser. fabian and i had painted them right before everything happened. it felt nice to know his room was ready and waiting for him!

so by the end of his second month of life devin was doing quite well. just learning to eat and putting on weight. he was still on oxygen but that was about it. he started getting just a tiny bit "chubby" (at least to us). i could'nt wait to get my boy home but knew he had a bit more of a journey to get there. more to come tomorrow ;)

1st birthday countdown - devin's 1st month...

i decided to take a great idea from a fellow blogger mama i found through michelle over at plus one. her name is emily and she has a darling, beautiful daughter named poppy who recently hit the big 1. her blog is called last train to pooksville. the link i provided starts you off at her first countdown post. there are 12 days left until devin turns one and what i will be doing each day is creating a post (with pictures of course) describing exactly what was going on in each month of devin's life starting with his first month. on the 12th day i will be making his birthday post! i so enjoyed knowing that emily would be pretty much forced to grace us with her blogger presence each and every night leading up to poppy's big day and loved getting to watch poppy grow all over again. so here goes...

devin's first month...
jue 23rd 2009 was the day devin was born. i had been in the hospital on the high risk floor for the last almost 5 weeks. i had a very difficult scary pregnancy. i started having bleeding at 5 weeks, just one week after i found out i was pregnant. for the first 20 weeks of my pregnancy i thought i was having a miscarriage pretty much every day. at 22 weeks i had yet another very heavy bleed and went to have my 20th or so ultrasound to make sure things with the baby still looked ok. they always had despite the scary unexplained bleeding. this time, things were not ok. i had no amniotic fluid. my water had broken at 22 weeks 6 days and i was admitted to the hospital. i was told i would stay there until i had my baby and the chances were that would be very soon. drs. gave me a less than 10% chance i would ever bring my son home alive. it was the most devastating day of my life. i was in complete agony over the aspect that my perfect baby could die and most likely would. drs. said the most a woman could go with 0 amniotic fluid is about 2 weeks and of course that still didn't give me much of a chance. fabian and i were asked to make a decision about whether or not we would want our son resuscitated if he came at some point in the 23 week mark because this was the "grey area". they would take life saving measures but they didn't recommend it. it was up to us.i refused to make that decision and fabian stuck by me. he told me things would be ok. our baby was strong and he would be just fine. i really wanted to believe him but man was it hard when every dr. and most nurses were preparing for the worst.

i laid in a hospital bed only getting up to use the lovely "bedside commode". i drank gallons of water a day and started researching preemies and pprom (preterm premature rupture of membranes). kanalen.org was a wonderful resource and taught me that there was real hope in a situation like ours. also, i started stalking the preemie parenting board on babycenter.com.

i started having contractions june 22nd overnight. the dr. checked me in the morning and it was official... i would be having a c-section today, at 25 weeks 6 days gestation. my baby was estimated to weigh 2 lbs. 3 oz and i was scared to death. he arrived at 10:51 am on june 23rd 2009. my birth story is actually awful, its here if you feel like reading it. this day began our NICU journey.

he weighed 2 lbs. 6oz and was 13.5 inches long. he was very sick for the first few days. he needed to be on the oscillating jet vent and his blood pressure was dangerously low. they had him on every possible medication to bring his blood pressure up to normal. nothin seemed to be working. we were told once agian we might lose our son. the first days were dreadful. it was such a blur. i was so scared and so happy and so sad all at the same time. fabian was very strong and of course remained positive the whole time. devin had jaundice and needed to be under the bili lights for quite some time. it seemed he was under those lights for months, but it was only a few weeks.

we had some wonderful nurses taking care of  devin for the first few days and i was able to interact with him on the very first day and hold him on his 3rd day. i started pumping breast milk about 20 hours after he was born and as his condition improved over the next few days and weeks, small amounts were finally introduced through his feeding tube.

first picture of the three of us together...

my first time holding him (and kissing him)...

things were very stressful. he was doing ok, but new things popped up each day. bad news, then good news, then worse news and so on. it was the most difficult time of our lives! i started doing kangaroo care after a week or so and it was wonderful. most of his nurses were great and allowed us to be very hands on. we bathed him, changed his diaper and held him alot.

the last week of his first month he was allowed to wear a real outfit! this is the first really happy picture of me, i was so glad to see him in a real baby outfit! i was so proud! the next day i was able to dress him myself! i hated that i had to be "allowed" to do things, but thats preemie momhood in the beginning. its hard, but oh so worth the wait! im a big fan of milestones and being mama to a preemie gave me waaaay more milestones to celebrate! devin hit so many milestones in his first month! coming off all blood pressure meds, coming off the vent, coming off c-pap, being held for the first time, first feeding, first bath, first time wearing clothes, first time taking a pacifier, first holiday (4th of july), and just plain surviving- not only surviving, but kicking ass at surviving were some milestones crossed in his first month. he had alot more to go, but we had made it a month and things were looking up. he was out of the woods... the dark scary part of the woods at least and things were becoming more routine and relaxed, well, relaxed isn't the right word, i guess things were just a tiny bit less horrible by the end of the month. each day, got more and more exciting as i slowly started to realize i had way more than a 10% of taking this amazing baby home after all.

its been soooo long!

          it's been so long since the last time i posted! here's my excuse... DEVIN'S CRAWLING!

and not sleeping through the night anymore. that part sucks big time but its so fun to watch him crawl all over the place! hes also pulling up to a stand on everything possible and looks like he'll start cruising furniture soon. he crawled and pulled up for the first time on the same night (5/29/10) and has been mobile ever since. we had to baby proof our ridiculously dangerous straight from the 70's house so now he has free roam over the entire upstairs.

 

i have no time at all to get on the computer for more than 5 minutes anymore so my blog has been neglected.  fabain has been working until 8 every night for the last week so that makes things extra hard and like i said, devin has decided the sleeping through the night thing is for babies and hes not one of them! he had slept from 10-11pm until 9-10am every night since he had been home for about 2 weeks. i think his top tooth thats about halfway there now is the culprit. its very hard to think about the fact that teething is just beginning!

not much has happened recently other than what ive already said. we did visit fabian's boss jack and his wife and daughter the other day. elisa is 5 months old and very cute. devin was very pleased to make her aquaintance!

they had fun palying. while elisa was in her walker, devin was on the ground crawling around her and he grabbed on and wouldnt let her go anywhere! it was funny...

oh! he also got his first bruise from bumping his head on the floor while crawling. it was very traumatic... for me and me alone. the bruise just faded today and it happened again, so now he has a slightly larger bruise in pretty much the same spot. im guessing it never ends from here?

ive been taking any free minute i get to create a huge scrapbook of devins firts year and plan on giving it to him on his birthday which is approaching very fast (6/23). it conatins about 10-25 of the best shots in each month he has been here. im very excited about completing it and plan on taking a picture of each page to blog about when it's finally done!

this time im not lying when i say i promise i'll be posting more often and i'll explain why in the next day or so ;) here are a few cute pictures, i have much more to say, but its late now....