And The Big Deal Today Is...

Eating!

Actually, getting Jonathan to eat instead of stuffing a tube down his throat and draining milk down into his stomach.

His biggest problem seems to be, again, floppy muscles. His jaw and cheeks aren't very strong and holding the nipple of even a bottle in his mouth, sucking, and swallowing all at the same time is a huge amount of work for him. He is doing it, though, with a lot of help. He hasn't been tube-fed at all yet today, thanks to AnneMarie, his very patient nurse who's spent most of the day coaxing him to eat. It's so much work for him that he falls asleep every 20 ccs of milk, so she waits for ten minutes, wakes him up, and coaxes the next 20 ccs down him. She does this by holding up his lower jaw with her middle finger and sometimes squeezing his cheeks a little too, which holds the nipple in for him so he's just sucking and swallowing. Mom tried to nurse him, but she doesn't have enough hands to be able to support him like that, so we're going to have to come up with something inventive until Jonathan's muscle tone improves and he's strong enough to do this on his own.

The good thing about muscles? Even if you're born with poor muscle tone, God mademuscles to get stronger with use. So the more Jonathan is forced to use those muscles, the stronger they'll get, the easier time he'll have, the less he'll fall asleep a third of the way through eating...and the faster we'll bring him home. We've seen such a huge improvement over the past three days (he ate 55 ccs from the bottle at his last feeding; yesterday he ate 10, then 20, then 30) that it's only a matter of time before he'll be strong enough to handle nursing from Mom.

If we can just get him eating consistantly from the bottle, we can work on his nursing at home where it's much easier for Mom to be right there round the clock. The nurses are using a special nipple on his bottles that makes it very hard for the milk to come out, therefore not making Jonathan get too used to milk just drip out when he licks the nipple.

For the rest...he's doing so well that he's like a normal little baby except for the eating thing. We were playing with him, walking with him, and doing the "running, running" game with his legs. I think he's smiling, too. When we blow on his belly or kiss him under his chin or under his ears, his eyes light up and his mouth starts to turn up - his whole expression changes. It's not like when he's upset, either - when he's upset he wrinkles his whole face up and makes growly noises. He really smiles a lot in his sleep if we kiss him in the fold of his neck between his jaw and shoulder. I hope to see a real smile sometime in the next few weeks...that would be just great. But we need to be able to keep playing with him like we have been.

We're really stretching things to be there as much as possible, which means we all go and take turns, some of us in with him and some out in the family area. We've been playing little kid's Nintendo games in our off-shifts: the hospital has an X-Box and a Gamecube and multiple flatscreen and DVD players, and we can rent the stuff for them by giving Jonathan's bed number at the PICU's desk and looking through a folder full of games to pick one. There's hardly ever anyone else there, so we've more or less taken over the family area and have been squandering our change buying microwave popcorn from the vending machine and taking turns with the games. We have very little video-game knowledge, so this one Super Mario game where you run the guy around with a hose and have to spray down live paint balls is about the toughest challenge we can handle!