We are grateful for miracles. This week Owen has made incredible strides towards coming home. In addition to self temperature regulation and wearing clothes, Owen has been moved to a crib and now wears a sleeper! He has decided he loves baths too! Since he is finally 33 weeks he was able to start bottle feeding twice a day!! He is doing amazing and in the morning he can usually finish his 40 ml bottle and at night he takes about two-thirds of it. We are incredibly proud of him. He does amazing during his feed but gets really tired afterwards and has a hard time keeping his oxygen levels up. On Tuesday night they gave him a little bit of oxygen to get him to come back up. He struggled for quite a while because he was so tired. We decided that doing some skin to skin may help get him to regulate so we tried it and he stopped having problems. The next day he started to struggle and so back to skin to skin and he stopped struggling. That evening we didn’t even give him the chance to struggle and right after his feed put him on our chest and he didn’t struggle. I tell this story because we have come to appreciate the power of skin to skin. It has done miracles for baby O. Hopefully he will get to move up on the frequency of his bottles shortly!

The other big thing that happened this week is we moved to the other side of the NICU. This side is often referred to as the graduation side or the feeder-grower side. This is where the babies that are stable go. We have more space and we can relax a bit knowing the doctors and nurses think our baby is okay.

The last thing that our amazing kid did this week was hit 4 pounds!!! This is huge because now he is at the weight he can fit into a car seat and come home when the time comes. Hopefully that will be in a couple of weeks if he keeps eating the way he is. 

Within the past week every nurse has told us a variation of how big Owen has gotten or how amazing he is doing. It makes us so proud and we love that he is exceeding expectations. This week we got some insight into what bad days look like and it really scared us (so much so that Jess didn’t leave the hospital the day after his low oxygen incidence). But knowing he could have bad days has made us appreciate his good days even more!