Lucas Camilo

Lucas keeps growing, which makes us very happy (heck, that’s what healthy babies do: eat, poop, grow… repeat.)  Yesterday we were back at the hospital for an appointment with the gastrointestinal specialist and Lucas tipped the scales at 9 pounds 1 ounce!  Still, he remains a tiny little dude – even as he steadily grows of late Lucas has only recently surpassed the average birth weight for a newborn despite the fact that he’s now 3 1/2 months old.

The business of growing is actually pretty tough when you’re saddled with the kind of challenges that Lucas is faced with.  Because of his breathing difficulties he burns up a lot of calories just taking in breaths (remember that his ventilator only provides pressure support and that he spends four or five hours a day off the vent.)  We try to strike a balance between stimulating Lucas to move around and observe the world – which he needs to do in order to overcome his brain injury – and giving him plenty of rest in a relaxed environment.  As the gastrointestinal specialist told us, “he’s got enough going on!”, which is to say that we want to make eating, feeding and growing as easy as possible for Lucas so that he can concentrate on overcoming his other challenges.

Speaking of size, the other day his physical therapist  observed how small the various parts of Lucas’s body are… except his ears!  Lucas took no offense and in fact we take pride in his disproportionately large extremities, not just ears but also fingers and toes.  On the whole his body remains extremely long and at least one of our friends thinks that he may end up being the tallest man in the world.  We checked his proportions after the doctor’s visit yesterday and found his weight to be in the 15th percentile for a low birth weight baby (based on his adjusted age of 1.5 months) and his length to be in the 100th percentile.

Here’s a song about being a little baby in a big world.  We play it a lot for Lucas since it’s good to be reminded that you’ll only be little for a little while.  Thanks to Evan and Aaron for introducing us to this beautiful music (the duo is called “Renee and Jeremy”).

And since November has come to a close here’s a slide show of some favorite Lucas shots from the last month…