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.