Three Pound Baby Now!

She's really packing on the pounds!  Her doctors and we would like her to gain a bit more quickly as she's only averaging 10 grams per days (about a third of an ounce) over the last week, but it's in the right direction overall. She uses a lot of her calories to breathe still and so the glorious day she spent on the nasal cannula instead of the the CPAP mask that covers her pretty little face was short lived. She'll get back there, though. 

What a day it was!  We walked in to find a baby whose face we could actually see in her isolette!  We had to check to see if it was really her.  We have also been getting to hold her now nearly every time we visit. I loved seeing her little face at last. Tiny perfect lips and button nose and she opened her eyes to the sound of her daddy's voice to look toward him.  She waves her arms around and wraps her hand around M's finger tips.  We both just kept staring at her in awe that we'd made this very tiny perfect little being.  

There is something biological about that moment when you get to really look at your baby's face and marvel at those small details and fixate on the growing roundness of her cheeks and her big eyes that are looking less like alien sized eyes below her high forehead.  She moves her tiny lips and makes tiny yawns and sneezes and coughs and cries and everything seems like it really will be okay.  

I had a c-section and was under general anesthesia due to the blood thinners I was taking (lovenox at the time) so did not see her when she was delivered.  I heard someone say that the moment their baby was delivered was the best moment of her life as she looked at her little wonder.  It was delayed for me, and maybe for M also, but I feel that now, five and a half weeks after she was born, we are getting more a glimpse of that feeling.  It has been more gradual in coming for me, not a thunderbolt of wonder, but more of a well filling with love for our baby.  

At first I felt afraid to let that happen as she seemed so little and her life so precarious. We would love her and give her all we could to help her survive and pray and hope to everything we knew to keep her with us.  We tried to stay realistic though and that included fears. As the fear subsides, the love and hopes replace it. 

Yesterday when we went in she even flipped her own head over; it was quite incredible strength for such a wee one (at least in the eyes of her flabbergasted parents).  Her nurse was also impressed.  She is strong.  Her doctors from the beginning have said that--our ob team especially. They wanted to name her something powerful.  In the days it took us to decide on her name we contemplated everything from Greek godessess to mythologic creatures to family names.  We ended up with a first name we simply liked and that leaves her future relatively free from teasing and name boredom.  Her middle name means "of the sky" in Latin.  M took Latin in college and she is celestial and strong. 

In fact, the day we went in to find her off her breathing mask, we saw a rainbow on our drive into the hospital.  And as we left we saw big post storm clouds glowing as the sun sank behind them.  They are connections to something larger I like to think.  She has had so many people loving her and praying for her in her short life that I believe all of that strength and hope and love and faith adds to her growth. It takes more than medicine.