bottles, bottles, bottles

Its all about the bottles these days. Virginia is taking more and more of her feeds by mouth each day. The past few days she has taken a few full bottles each day and a few partial bottles. She has definitely made alot of progress, but we are still a little ways away from the end goal. Eventually she has to be taking all of her bottles by mouth without having any episodes of choking and dropping her heartrate. These two things will likely go hand in hand. Once she is doing that consistently for a several days she will come home. Sounds pretty simple, right? Unfortunately the suck, swallow, breathe sequence is the most difficult things for preemies to master.

Virginia is up to 5 lb 15 oz and 18.5" long!!! She is getting so big! Our routine each evening consists of feeding her at 6pm, snuggling, reading books, practicing tummy time, getting her weighed, changing her clothes and blankets, feeding her at 9pm and snuggling her back to sleep. She almost always wakes right back up when I put her back in her crib to go home. She is getting smart, she knows that if she wakes up and looks at us with her big blue eyes that we will stay just a bit longer. It is so hard to leave her at the end of the night these days. Its so hard to not be there all day knowing that she is more and more wakeful, that she is doing all sorts of "baby" things. We hope and pray that she will master that complex suck,swallow, breathe sequence and be home with us soon.