Suck, Swallow, and Breathe

Today Mary Clare passed her swallow study with flying colors. Her EKG of her heart repair looked well also. We are continuing to compress her feeding into an hour’s time while increasing her consumption volume. Tomorrow it will be reduced to thirty minutes.

*Big News: Tomorrow we get the opportunity to try bottle feeding for the first time, and as her intake increases she will graduate to breast feeding. This sounds like a simple thing to do until you realize that it will take the next two weeks, every three hours, to get her to learn to do this.

*More Big News: The bandages on her chest are off and her pacing wires were pulled from here heart wall this morning. All we have left is an IV and some telemetry feeds on her back to monitor her heart rate and saturation level.

We are still doing well in our little 8 X 8 cabin here on the cardiac cruise ship. When Kerri gets tired of me she makes me sit in the bathroom. Mary Clare has also been sleeping the entire day and waking like a raccoon at night, staring into the darkness with her teeny little eyes. She gets her night tendancies from her father. We’ll let you know how bottle feeding goes tomorrow.