Noah is home...finally!

After 72 days in hospital, Noah came home on Tuesday. It has been an absolute delight having him home. He has been waking up between every 3 to 4 hours for a nappy change and a feed but he is really good during the night. Around midnight, 4.15am and 8.30am. During the day he feeds a little closer together, I think to make up for long gaps at night. Plus he might be having a growth spurt. We have had visits, but not too many, we have been visiting, but not too much and we have taken him to our fertility doctor for a show off and he was really lovely and genuinely so happy for us both that after 3 years of infertility treatment we finally have a healthy little baby!! He held the baby and gave us both a cuddle and congratulated us both.

He has come out of the whole experience pretty much unscathed. He has a small hemangioma on his forearm, which will go away in time.  He does have a little bit of Retinopathy of Prematurity, but it is stable at stage II so it will most likely resolve itself without treatment. He is home on only Iron (for Anemia) and Pentavite (Multivitamin).

Before leaving the hospital he had a full blood count, a head ultrasound, an eye test and a hearing test. He was a little anemic, which could have resolved on its own in time, but we decided to go ahead and give him some blood so that he would have enough energy to breastfeed. His head ultrasound was completely normal. He passed his hearing test with flying colours. His eye test revealed that he still has Stage II Zone II ROP, but that the blood vessels are nice and fine and non-tortuous so it will more than likely resolve itself. He has to go back to the hospital Tuesday for another eye check and the Friday after that he has a check up with his paediatrician.

Now I'm going to talk about poo so if you dont want to hear about this, you might want to skip this paragraph. We had to give him a suppository yesterday because he hadn't pooped for about 7 days and he was really uncomfortable straining and pushing to no avail. So we cut a glycerine suppository in half and popped it up there and he is now suitably relieved. Its normal for a breastfed baby to go up to 10 days without a poo, but he is also on iron so maybe that is making him a little more constipated, so we let it go for for 7 days but that was enough.  He was crying straining. We tried giving him cooled boiled water for a couple of days, then the brown sugar and prune juice and apple juice suggestions came, but we think he is too little to experiment with sugars right now. Might throw out his electrolyte balance or something. The suppositories aren't something that you do every few days, it is more a last resort. Hopefully he will have built up some pooing muscles with all that straining over 10 days.

Ok back to the nice stuff. He has had a few visits with his Nana who loves him so much she was upset yesterday that she couldn't hold him because she felt a bit queasy in the tummy, so she sacrificed her cuddles for his sake. We have heaps of photos that have to uploaded. Also need to go to the photo booth and print some hard copies of these photos so we can post them out to everyone and get his photo album sorted. He is so cute in his little clothes. We have two pj's in 000000's but mostly his outfits are 00000's and a little bit big on him, but he will grow into them. But i think he will grow too tall for them before long.

When Kim had the 19 week ultrasound, his arms and legs were measuring 2 to 3 weeks behind (the start of his growth restriction). The sonographer put it down to hereditary shortness on Kim's behalf. But it turns out that he has got big feet and hands and his arms and legs are quite long really. So i don't think this kid is gonna be a short stuff like his mum. Here is a pic of Noah getting cuddles with Nana!

Oh well how ever he turns out, he is going to be absolutely lovely, we are in love totally with our little man and we are enjoying having him home waking us up and taking up every spare moment we have 100%