Monday, June 4, 2012

5 month birthday at home

I know its been a while since the last post but it's been a crazy few weeks after bringing Allison home. And there has been a lot of changes around the house and new rules to learn. For instance I cannot use the baby as a jumping off point to get to the back of the couch. Eddie and Chrissy never minded it when I did it to them but like I said, new rules. Before I get to those, since Allison just had her 5 month birthday, and at last check she was just over 9 lbs, I thought you should see how she has grown.

 February 2nd
 March 2nd
 April 2nd
May 2nd
June 2nd

So we all spent the first week at home together trying to get a regular schedule going. However Allison still had some feeding issues we were working through. She gets fed every 4 hours and a feeding consists of 30 minutes on the bottle, 30 mins pumping the rest through her feeding tube and then about 30 mins holding her upright to make sure she doesn't throw up what she just ate. The last 30 mins were most important because she tends to throw up a lot of her feed. This makes for long days and nights. So we went to a Pediatric GI Specialist to figure out the problems. She gave us some changes we made with her feeds to help.

The second weekend we were home was Mother's Day weekend. We spent Saturday over at Eddie's parent's house where she got to meet her cousins Ella and Ashley and Uncle Bernie for the first time. We got a some pictures of the girls together. This was the best of them though.


The next day Chrissy's family all came over to our house where her mom made dinner for us.  This was extremely nice since it was her Mother's Day also. Allison also got to finally meet her cousin Natalie, who was equally excited.  We spent the day hanging out at the house and then everyone went home except Chrissy's mom. She stayed the next week with us to help out. She had a lot of fun spending time with her granddaughter (but I realized Eddie never pulled out the camera and it wasn't really meant for my kitty paws so I am off the hook).

That has been life here at the house until some strange occurrences happened. First, Allison pulled the tape off her tube that held it in place and we were out of supplies for a few days to replace it. So we opted to leave it out until the supplies arrived. During this time we noticed she was feeding much better and seemed generally happier. She also was not throwing up nearly as often or as much as she was before. When we spoke with the doctors about this they said those are possible side effects from the NG-Tube. Thats when we made the decision to switch her to a G-tube.  But we couldn't get her in for the surgery to insert it for a couple weeks. And while she was doing much better she still was not feeding fully so we had to put the NG tube back until the surgery scheduled for last Friday.

Next, Allison managed to pull her tube loose again so Eddie and Chrissy have had to learn how to insert the tube themselves. This goes through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach, and they make sure they don't miss and get it in her lungs (not the place we want to pump her feeds). They have gotten pretty good at it until this last time when Allison seemed to have some kind of reaction to the tape or foam used to keep it in place.



That's what happened after a couple days of it being in place. So they pulled it out and made a quick run to the walk-in clinic. Always a fun trip for first time parents. But they got some cream to help it heal and kept the the tube out until their doctor appt the following Thursday. This was the pre-op session because Allison was scheduled to go in for the G-tube surgery the next day.  However since we had the feeding tube out for the previous 5 days she was eating much better and taking most of her feeds by nipple which had been the problem all along. When the doctors saw how well she was doing they put the surgery on hold. We will go back in a couple more weeks to evaluate her progress again and see how she is doing. But from the pictures below you can judge for yourself.




But I'm still going to keep an eye on her to make sure she is o.k.


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