Oliver is 6 weeks old now

I'm skipping ahead.  I was trying to write out the story of going into labor, but I hit the hard part, and just couldn't go on.  The day we were told we had a decision to make, the day that we were told our son probably would never have a normal life, if he even survived delivery if they couldn't stop my labor.  I couldn't do it.  So I'm skipping that part, and bringing you to present day.

Oct 12 - First, it's my niece Corryn's first birthday.  Happy birthday, baby girl!  We won't be able to travel to Omaha this weekend for her party, but my sister Jamie, her husband Nate, and this cutie pie came out here to visit last weekend.  It was great to see them.   And, my friend Mindy will be having her baby boy today.  Congrats Mindy and Joel.

Nathaniel and Corryn at the Pumpkin Patch 10/7/12

Oliver is 45 days old today.  He weighs 2 pounds, 8 ounces.  I don't think they measure his length very often, but I have to assume he's grown at least a couple of inches since he was born.

Oliver 6 weeks old - Kangaroo Care

Since Oliver came off of the ventilator, he had been on SIPAP, which is a dual pressured oxygen delivery mask.  Yesterday, though, he got moved onto a bubble CPAP.  I don't really know what that is, but he got a different set of head gear which looks a little more comfortable.  He has Chronic Lung Disease, which will be a problem for at least his first 2 years.  His doctor this month (they rotate), Dr. James Barry, told me yesterday to expect that every little cold will send him to the ER, and a stronger cold will put him into the hospital.  This wasn't good news when we have a toddler in daycare who comes home with a cold about once a month.  It has me more than a little worried.

Yesterday, Oliver was getting 14 ml of milk every 2 hours, and his care times were every 4 hours.  At cares, he gets a diaper change, temperature taken, and a respiratory therapist comes to check his nose for irritation, check his lung sounds, and make any adjustments between prongs/mask on his breathing machines.  While he seems to like eating, he does not like being messed with.  In rounds today, his doctors decided that even though he doesn't weigh 1200 grams yet (which is when they usually change to a three hour routine), they would try moving his feedings (and his cares) to 23 ml every 3 hours.  I'm currently pumping about 150 ml of milk every 3 hours, so I've decided to donate some of the extra to the Milk Bank of Colorado.

Up until today, his cares have been at 10, 2 and 6.  I am there for his 10 am care, and on the evenings David can leave work a little early we head out to the hospital for the 6 pm care.  Now, moving to every 3 hours, they'll be at 9:30, 12:30, 3:30, and 6:30.  I'll have to be on the road a little earlier to make the 9:30 am, and hopefully there will be a couple days a week that David can take a long lunch hour so that I can stay for the 12:30.  We've put Nathaniel in 1/2 day daycare, so he has to be picked up by 12:30.  I hate not being able to be there longer, but he's in excellent hands, and Nathaniel needs me too.

8 weeks old

Today Oliver is 8 weeks old.  He weighs just shy of three pounds - yay!  He's had a lot of big changes this week.  He's been cycling off of cpap onto a high flow nasal cannula.  Yesterday they tried the high-flow for 3 hours, and today he'll be on it for 6 hours straight.  He did great on it this morning while I was at the hospital, holding him.  I really like the cannula because it's smaller and he doesn't have to wear head gear with it.  Yesterday they didn't start until 12:30 pm, so I didn't get to see him with it.  Today he went onto it at his 9:30 cares, so I was there, and boy does that kid have a huge noggin!  I'm not sure when that happened.

8 weeks and 3 lbs

He's getting 28 ml of milk at a time, every 3 hours.  In the next couple of weeks, I'll finally get to start trying to nurse him.  He needs to be off of the cpap full time before that happens, though.  His nurse said that he'll mostly need to be on a bottle, though, to get extra calories through an additive.  I fully plan on fighting this when the time comes.  I've seen first hand through Nathaniel that nursing alone can keep weight gain going.

The one set back (if you can even call it that) is that he has a hernia that is going to need surgery.  They're saying that it can wait until after he goes home, but then that means going back and another hospital stay after we get used to having him home.  I'm not sure why it would be done that way.  But overall, he's had a great week.  It's so easy to forget how critical he is when he's taking so many steps forward.

Moving to Colorado

David started his new job on July 16.  He traveled back and forth, home late on Friday, leaving again Sunday early afternoon.  It wasn't long before this started wearing on Nathaniel and I.  The last week of July, we went to Denver with him on a house hunting trip.  It was miserably hot, and I was still miserably sick every morning.  David had narrowed down our search the previous week, so I only had about 8 houses to look at.  It only took us two days to settle on the right house, and two more to get it bought.  It was real - we were moving, and we had a new home.

Our new home

Our house wouldn't be ready for a month, and after that it was going to take another week for the relocation company to get our furniture out there.  We had discussed Nathaniel and I staying in Illinois until everything was ready, but I missed my husband, and Nat missed his daddy.  We planned our move for August 18.  We were going to take our time and space the 1000 mile drive over three nights.

Nathaniel saying goodbye to our old house

Two days before our move, I woke up early in the morning to contractions and bleeding.  Panicked, I called Nathaniel's old babysitter to see if she could keep him for the day, and headed to the hospital.  By the time I got there I was only having sporatic contractions, and the bleeding had stopped, but I still felt like it had been too much to ignore.  I was hooked up to a contraction monitor, but it wasn't picking up anything.  They did a quick ultrasound to check on the baby, and told me everything looked fine.  I was given a lecture on not picking up Nathaniel, which is what they claimed my problem was.  I'm not sure how I was expected to accomplish that, but that was my discharge instruction, don't pick up your 16 month old son.  I still feel guilty that I didn't push for more - I knew something was off, I just didn't feel right.

David got home Friday night as usual, and Saturday we packed up, said good bye to our families, and headed out.  We spent Saturday night at our usual hotel in Bettendorf, IA, and Sunday made it to my sister's in Omaha.  I continued having contractions, but the nurse at St Mary's had told me they weren't anything to worry about until they were a minute long and 5 minutes apart.  While they sometimes hit 5 minutes apart, they were never longer than 30 seconds.  I was worried, but couldn't get the nurse's instruction out of my head, and didn't want to be told yet again that I was overreacting. 

We spent both Sunday and Monday nights in Omaha, and then Tuesday morning headed out on the last leg of the trip to Denver.  My sister tried talking me into going to the hospital before I left Omaha, but I brushed her off.  Now, I wish I had listened to her.  I was still having contractions, but they weren't long, and they weren't painful.  We made our way across Nebraska, and stopped for dinner as soon as we crossed into Colorado.  I continued to have contractions all through dinner, and starting timing them again when we got back in the truck.  Within a couple of hours, they were closer, longer, and starting to hurt.  I told David to find a hospital as soon as we got to Denver.

Our first night in our new town was spent at Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge, CO.  As soon as I walked in and told them that I was 23 weeks pregnant and having contractions 4 minutes apart, I was whisked up to the high risk side of labor and delivery.  As I changed into a gown, the contractions were getting stronger and stronger, and the doctor on call soon came in to check me.  David had stayed out in the truck with a sleeping Nathaniel (by this time it was 10 pm), so I was alone when I was told that yes, I was in labor.  I was dilated and fully effaced, and the amniotic sack was bulging with each contraction. It was not a good situation.  Welcome to Colorado!

My first pregnancy - Nathaniel

David and I met when we were both working for Tate and Lyle in Decatur, IL.  After getting engaged on Christmas Eve of 2009, we were married on June 26, 2010.  Immediately after getting back from our honeymoon, we discovered we were expecting.

Pregnancy does not agree with me.  From day one, I was miserably sick.  Still, I enjoyed being pregnant, especially once I started feeling movement.  We had decided not to find out what we were having, much to our families' irritation.  Finally, some time in my 7th month I started feeling better, and the remainder of the pregnancy was uneventful.

On March 22, 2011 Nathaniel David was born at St Mary's Hospital in Decatur, IL.  He weighed 6 lbs and 13 oz.  As soon as my water had broken, we knew there were going to be complications from meconium.  An entire team of doctors and nurses were on standby for his birth.  We were told that there was a good chance he was going to have to be transferred to a bigger hospital in a larger town.  Once he was born, he was assessed, wrapped up, and brought over to me for all of ten seconds before being taken to the nursery. 21 hours of labor, three epidurals, and over three hours of pushing had resulted in a vacuum assisted delivery to ensure he'd have as much of the fluid he had inhaled squeezed out of his as possible, but he'd still had problems. He was intubated, twice, but kept pulling the tube out, so they settled on an oxygen mask that looked like a space helmet.  He needed a weeks' course of strong antibiotics, but stayed stable enough that he didn't require transfer.

The hardest part was that we were told not to touch him as any contact made his heart rate race.  Obviously, we were not allowed to hold him, and I wasn't allowed to nurse him.  On his third day, his vitals finally stabilized to where we could hold him.  And what a moment that was!  On his fifth day, his breathing finally slowed enough that I was able to start nursing him.  He didn't take to it well, and it was incredibly frustrating.  I already felt like I had failed him by not keeping him safe before his birth, so this just compounded it.  Thankfully, within a couple of days he took right to it well enough and was soon gaining weight.  He was 8 days old when we finally brought him home to our house in Mt Zion.  Breastfeeding would end up being one of the hardest things I'd ever had to learn how to do.  For something so natural, it's incredibly difficult.  The best advice I had read was to not have any formula in our house.  Had I had any at my disposal, I would have used it.  But I was determined, especially after he was born with complications, that he would be exclusively breast fed.

David had taken a new position with Tate and Lyle at the beginning of the year, and unfortunately, it came with international travel.  Quite a bit of it.  When Nathaniel was 6 weeks old, David took off for London for 6 weeks.  To say it was hard of me... well, that would be an understatement.  Nathaniel had colic, and would just cry, for hours.  Then, he had gotten a cold, which messed up his latch, which left me cracked, bleeding, and in all sorts of pain. I think he also had reflux, because he would just scream when I'd try to feed him.  He would cry, I would cry.  It was really rough.  Luckily, for the majority of this trip I was still on maternity leave.  We spent a lot of time at my grandmother's, who is in her 90's and doesn't get out much anymore.  I think she really enjoyed our visits.

 



 Nathaniel needed follow-up checks for a hole he had in his heart, but was growing so well that his cardiologist pretty much dismissed him as soon as she saw him.  He became an entirely different baby at around 13 weeks.  No more reflux, no more colic.  Happy, healthy, he really was a dream baby. 

David's job continued to take him out of the country for weeks at a time.  Neither of us was happy with the situation.  When Nathaniel was 10 months old, David got a call from an old boss, who had a position coming open.  Were we interested in moving to Colorado?

My answer was a resounding no.  Our entire families were in Illinois, all our friends, our lives as we knew it.  However, maybe this could be a way to get David out of his current position.  He already had his next position at Tate and Lyle lined up, but we had no idea when he was going to get to take it.  Possibly, if he had another job lined up, they would let him move on in order to keep him at the company.  So we went through with looking into the job.

In March, Nathaniel turned a year old, and two weeks later we found out we were expecting again.   I couldn't imagine going through another newborn stage, and this time with a toddler, with David traveling so much. At the end of April, we traveled out to Denver for David's second job interview.  A week later, the job offer came through.  And while we had initially pursued the job as a negotiation tool with Tate and Lyle, it looked good.  And it was a great company.  And, David really, really liked it.  It was a great opportunity.  I could tell, David wanted it.  Really, really wanted it.

Tate and Lyle made it really easy to quit - they did absolutely nothing to keep David.  And my job, well... it was just a job.  I liked most of the people I worked with, but a lot had changed at the company, and it just wasn't the place it used to be.  I didn't have any trouble saying goodbye.  Our last day was July 13.  David had spent his last 2 weeks in France, including the 4th of July.  I was ready to have my husband back, full time.  And if that meant I had to move to Colorado to do it, I guess that's what we had to do.  I did make David promise me, though, that if in a couple of years I was miserably homesick, he had to look for something closer to home.  I can do anything for a couple of years, right?  Looked like my family was off on a new adventure, and it looked like we were going to have to become Broncos fans.