16 weeks

Today little man is 16 weeks old.

The last couple of days have been pretty uneventful. Little man doing extremely well breast and bottle feeding and is looking at increasing his suck feeds perhaps in the next day or two. Mummy was shown how to administer Jensen's vitamins today, as he will be coming home on quite a lot of supplements. These include iron, a multivitamin, his extra calories, Thyroxin, and a few others depending on the next blood test. These go in his bottle and makes the milk look terrible, but taste of sugary loveliness....needless to say, little man drinks it down a treat.

More talk of discharge today with more preparations taking place. We are to hire a monitor called a Graseby tomorrow for us to take home. As Jensen will be coming home on oxygen, he must be monitored. I very much like this idea, as the machine not only monitors his oxygen saturation, but ticks on every breath he takes, and alarms if he doesn't after 20 seconds. You can turn the tick off if feeling confident, and would like a 'tickless' few hours of sleep. The monitor is very portable and hangs off your wrist or crib, it also downloads the data for the nurses to check periodically. The discharge nurses will visit us three days after arriving home and once weekly for 7 weeks. We also have the support of visits from the local Baby Health centre, Lactation clinic at the hospital, and Miracle Babies Foundation if need be. However, I am still feeling nervous about bringing the little chap home. I've turned into a cleaning psycho germaphobe...besides washing everything in sight, I've now started disinfecting everything...even employing the scrubbing hands of my mother to help wash down walls! (Thanks mum).

As we will be coming home on Oxygen, we have to inform the local fire brigade, and the strata. We also have to be careful with open flames etc in the house. The tank will be set up somewhere central in the house and has 9 metres of tubing. We are hoping this will reach both the bedroom and lounge room. We will also take home a portable back pack tank to take with us on outings. Hopefully our pram won't be too much longer so we can venture out for a little walk on a sunny winter's day. Other than that we will be bound up inside escaping the winter cold (and germs), until we become used to being parents, with our beautiful baby at home.

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