oh my, he is getting so big. and just keeps getting cuter and cuter. It would've been a really nice picture of Ryan and John, but I messed up. Anyway, we are back on track with the poop situation after some monkeying around with his meds and increasing his formula again. up to 35 ml/hour--this is about 28 ounces a day--we are getting there. slowly, but we are getting there. next ChIRP clinic visit is on Wednesday and I'm hoping we'll get some good news about TPN decreasing at that point.
We had our first post-NICU line infection scare this week (well, the doctors were scared...I wasn't). Ryan was acting fine but had a runny nose and low grade temp last week. His liver enzymes doubled out of the blue, so this could be indicative of either an upper respiratory virus or a smoldering line infection. I was pretty confident that he was fine, other than the runny nose, since he's so happy and busy all the time, but they ordered blood cultures anyway. So far, the cultures are negative. The liver tests are normalizing and the runny nose has also stopped. So, we think it was the virus causing the problems.
Otherwise, Ryan is really figuring out his hands but is still very much a wild man and needs a swaddle to help get to sleep, but every morning when I see him still sleeping, he's unswaddled with his hands out to the sides. Hopefully soon, he'll be less crazy and we can stop swaddling him to calm him down. He has the best belly laughs--this is such a treat for me since Caitlin never giggled at this age and Nora doesn't really either. Ryan laughs and it is so so cute--he's really got a large personality for such a small baby. He sleeps much better--now 7:30pm until about 6:30am. Always wakes up in a pool from all the fluid he gets overnight, but it doesn't phase him--he's super happy in the morning and very chatty. kind of takes the sting out of the early wake up. we are really enjoying him now---a totally different baby than the screaming maniac we brought home from the NICU 3 months ago.
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Random thought/memory: The other day John found an old post-it note on my desk from when I was pregnant with the twins. I had written some baby boy name contenders on it from an Irish Baby Names website or something. The names were: Keon, Ronan, Fineas, Dominick, Case, Quinn. I have a faint memory of the discussion about those names. I remember liking them all (I picked them out)--we wanted to stick with an Irish name but I worried they weren't mainstream enough to match the sister's names that we had narrowed down to: Claire and Eleanor. John only liked Case, Fineas and Ronan if I remember correctly--we especially liked Fineas/Finn and Case. However, none of them actually made it into our discussion the night the babies were born. Nora was Nora without too much discussion, but we weren't sure what to name our boy. The night they were born, the neonatologist came to talk to us and gave us updates on "Nora and your son"--so I felt like we needed to name this poor boy asap. We had pretty much narrowed it down to Ryan Michael or Sean Michael--I liked them both. I was leaning toward Sean--less popular, a form of "john," equally as Irish as "Ryan." John liked "Ryan" better. I remember how when Caitlin was born and we were deciding between "Caitlin," "Sarah," and "Rachel," and it was the day after the poor girl was born and yet she was still unnamed--John came into the hospital room that morning, glowing with the glow of a first time dad after a long day and night previously and pronounced that he was quite sure she looked like a Rachel. To that, I said "no, it's Caitlin." and so it was. Recalling that, in my post-twin-whirlwind-labor-emergency-stupor, I, very clearly and intentionally gave the baby boy naming task over to John. I knew he'd do a good job (I secretly hoped he'd choose Sean). He said "I really like 'Ryan.'" And so it was.
In the end, Ryan is such a Ryan. It fits him perfectly. It means "King."
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