Adventures in "normal"

When we left clinic last week, we were told to feed Blaise "bottles during the day like a normal baby." No fixed schedule, no fixed amounts. "On demand" feeding. There is one problem with this plan: No one involved has any idea how a normal baby eats. We're working on it, but Blaise doesn't recognize hunger and doesn't know that she should eat more at once than she did before. It's pretty clear that she still thinks of anything above 34 cc as a bonus. We also have no idea how long she should go between bottles or how much we should expect her to take at once. We'd take our cues from her, but she hasn't worked out her own cues. It's an interesting project anyway.

Speaking of interesting, the fun never really stops around here. Last night around 10, I was getting ready for bed (yeah, we're real party animals) and Ben was changing Blaise's diaper. All of a sudden, he started yelling for me. I ran into Blaise's room, where I found both of them very upset and formula gushing out of the hole in Blaise's belly, the one that usually contains her tube/button. We slapped gauze over the hole. Her tube had caught on something and tugged out, with the balloon that usually holds it in place still inflated. I deflated the balloon, re-inserted the button and inflated the balloon again. Lots of tears from all three of us and a couple of panicked phone calls to Children's (to find out if we needed to come in) and to Andrew (to give us a ride in case we needed to go to Children's) and we settled down. It sounds like a much bigger deal than it is. The g-tube site is healed up all around like a piercing, so you can just stick the tube back in, but we'd never done it before and I'd only seen it done once. It was much more an emotional crisis than a medical one, but I don't recommend it as an experience.

By this morning, though, we were back to our usual calm.