Day 37

The good news just keeps on rolling in. Today's nurse (another new face!) estimated that Brynn would be home in 10 days or less!!! She has been eating at least 5 full bottles out of 7 feedings a day. The nurse asked the doctors to calculate a "minimum" feeding amount from her bottles before she has to be tube-fed. When she meets all the minimums in a 24-48 hour period, then they will be removing her feeding tube. They have even started giving us some discharge instructions bit by bit. Overall, it is amazing news but also very overwhelming. We had in our heads that we'd have her home around Thanksgiving--and that was if we were really lucky. She still weighs on 3 lb 1 oz. so it's hard to imagine having her at home.

One of the best programs in the NICU is called "Care by Parent." When your baby is ready to discharge, they have rooms across the hall from the NICU where you can stay overnight for 1-2 nights with your baby. We'll be able to "pretend" we're at home with Brynn while having the NICU literally right next door. Blaine is particularly happy about the extra support as he joked with our nurse today that he was planning on buying a heartrate/respiratory rate monitor like she uses in the NICU on ebay for home use (at least I hope he's joking!).

We are heading out for her 10:00 PM feeding tonight, but I thought I'd go ahead and post now rather than at midnight when we finally make it home. I'll report on tonight's activities in tomorrow's update. Until then, grow Brynn grow.