Life in the NICU with Lyla

Lyla has now been in the NICU for 12 days... the longest days of my life! We started out going to the hospital to see her 3 times a day: at 6:30am, 12:30pm, and 6:30pm. After about 4 days of that schedule, I decided (with much guilt) that we needed to cut out the 6:30am feeding. Zoey was keeping me up quite a bit at night and I was just running on an empty tank. I was beyond exhaustion and felt physically sick. After a couple of good naps and days of sleeping in (ordered by my nurse mom!), I felt much, much better.

Our visits with Lyla are usually only 30 minutes long since she gets tired pretty quickly. I try to nurse her, which is sometimes successful, and sometimes not so much. And then we try to feed her a bottle of breastmilk. She's not a very eager eater and so of course I constantly worry that she's not eating enough. For a couple of days, her weight was going down, but lately it's been increasing gradually! She is now 3 lbs, 10.9 oz. The doctor says she needs to be close to 4 lbs before they'll consider letting her go home, and she needs to spend at least 24 hours in a crib and be able to regulate her own temperature. Right now she is still in the incubator, but it's turned all the way down to the lowest setting! So she is definitely making progress!

Life in the NICU with Lyla has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster:

-initial joy over how healthy she was and how little medical help she needed (no IV, oxygen, feeding tube, etc.),
-complete sadness at having to walk out of the NICU with her sister in a car seat and leaving her there,
-the highs and lows that accompany every single feeding, depending on the quantity she ate, how much she might have thrown up or pooped, and hearing how much weight she gained or lost.

Despite the emotions that come and go with every visit, I'm always so excited to see her and hold her again! I am SO looking forward to bringing her home and dressing her in her own clothes, and seeing her next to her sister (and brother and other sister)!!!

look how little her hand is next to Eric's!


Her Mimi and Papa loved coming to visit her with me, and gave her strict instructions on how much to grow when they left!