More pictures

We still need to transfer pictures and videos from our cameras, but you can see some that Ben's folks took this weekend here. Here's one of Blaise looking much perkier than she did immediately post-op (and Ben looking a lot like his dad).


The first piece of big news is that Blaise has doubled her birth weight and is now over 3.5 kg. This means she's outgrowing the newborn sizes! It's a little sad to have some of our favorite outfits be a bit too small, but it's great to have a nice armful of baby to cuddle.

As I mentioned last time, we've resumed feeds and Blaise's team is very optimistic about her ability to process food. Right now she gets 4 mL/hour, mostly by the g-tube, but every third hour we shut off the g-tube and give her the 4 mL by bottle. The plan is to go up by 2 mL/hour every other day and eventually start turning down her PN to see whether she can gain weight from the milk. We were actually shocked by how optimistic the doctors are about feeding, so shocked that we're not telling anyone what they said, lest we jinx it. In short, they're talking about getting her off PN much, much sooner than we would have expected. The plan we had discussed pre-op was based on the assumption that they wouldn't find enough extra small bowel to save and that Blaise would lose her ICV, if she had one. But, as her surgeon said, Blaise changed the game. This new plan all depends on her ability to tolerate the feeding and to absorb enough calories from the milk to gain weight appropriately, so we're remaining cautious in our optimism. We're sure we'll hit some roadblocks, but patience hasn't failed us yet.