The Morning After...

Not a whole lot of sleep to speak of last night for either of us. Despite the fact that our girls were down in the NICU, the nurses here are still closely monitoring Erica after surgery so there were many visits throughout the night for drugs and blood draws and rolling Erica around in bed. She even started working with the breast pump.

Early this morning I got restless and was eager to see how Madeline and Elizabeth were doing. No news from the NICU is good news and I made my way down there to discover them comfortable and resting peacefully. There was a new shift coming on so I got to meet their daytime nurses. The nurse for Elizabeth invited me to try out bottle feeding and I excitedly agreed. We both did really well and she ate about 17cc of formula. It's going to be a learning process but we hit the ground running. Liz got dressed up in big girl clothes and was placed into a big girl crib! She might even be able to come upstairs into the room with us tonight if everything goes well.

Madeline is still on the CPAP and has had the feeding tube put in. The doctors are still keeping an eye on her elevated rate of breathing, but some more time "making bubbles" should do the trick. The respiratory nurses seem confident that she will continue to improve. Maddie occasionally makes these little grunting noises that are an effect of her condition. She seems to have become accustomed to the tubes and is usually laying in her trademark spread eagle position in the warmer.

Erica is looking forward to visiting our babies in the NICU and it sounds like that might happen very soon. We'll have more pictures and updates soon. Go check out the new pictures in our album.