Lucas Camilo

Getting to be Lucas’s parents was awesome, despite all the challenges.  It turns out parenting Lucas and a little sister can be even more fun, especially when no one is in the hospital.

Ida has been home two weeks now, and as she grows and thrives the whole hospital ordeal feels more and more like some distant bad dream.  At home we get to just enjoy her funny noises, ridiculously cute faces, and the joy of seeing Lucas and Ida together.   Lucas continues to thrive as a big brother, keeping track of Ida by her sounds from anywhere in the house and regularly asking “what’s my sister doing?”  He’s learned to interpret her sounds for us: any signs of a cry from her and he says matter-of-factly, “she’s getting fussy, I think she’s hungry.”  And when we snuggle up to watch a movie or read a book, he often asks us to put Ida on his belly or by his side.

The other really exciting news is that Ida is doing great at coordinating her eating and breathing!  In fact, a week after we came home from the hospital we decided to disregard the conservative warnings we got from some of the hospital staff who insisted that she wouldn’t breast feed any time soon.  Instead, we called in a very experienced lactation consultant, and with her supervision we let Ida try again at breast feeding.  And she did great!  In fact, she did better at nursing than she did with her high-tech hospital bottle  (which didn’t surprise the lactation consultation one bit).  Ida still doesn’t coordinate the suck/swallow/breath maneuver perfectly all the time, so Krista’s pumping milk and we bottle feed her at times.   But she’s done so well that we took the NG tube out almost immediately — and that was nearly 10 days ago.  We also rented an extremely sensitive scale so we could be sure she was getting enough to eat.  And indeed – she’s already gained a pound and a half since birth, making her a chunky 9 1/2 pounds.

Here’s are some pictures from her first few weeks: