Back to Home

Time flies when you are taking care of Benjamin! I have hardly had time to do simple things like dishes, laundry, etc. My life is filled with demands of a newborn (or at least an adjusted newborn) and the many, many doctor/specialist appointments that come with a micro preemie.

We were discharged from the hospital on Thursday afternoon. Scarcely can I remember a time when I was more relieved to see our house! We had 3 sleepless nights at the hospital (especially the last one) and I had more than one meltdown, but by the grace of God we made it and Benjamin is doing well. He now has 3 more scars to add to his collection, now totaling 6. He still has spits up more than we would like and has some painful digestive stuff, but all in all we think he is doing pretty good. He lost an ounce from the time he was admitted to his followup appointment on Monday, but we hope he will recover that ground soon. Some good news is that prior to the surgery he grew enough that he is now reduced to 24 calorie milk, which is much nicer than the rich 30 cal milk he was on when he left the NICU, and he was able to drop one of his prescriptions.

Since the surgery we have tried to keep things pretty mellow, but we have enjoyed time with family. Tuesday night we had dinner with Brian's family as we said farewell to Brian's brother David after enjoying a 4 week visit. Wednesday Benjamin and I went for our first visit to Grandma & Grandpa's farm. We enjoyed a long walk through the filbert orchard and found a few cherries on a wild cherry tree. It was so peaceful and restful. Benjamin got his first lesson in patty-cake, Grandpa style. Oddly enough, patty-cake is part of his physical therapy!

Benjamin is a strong boy. We had a visit with the Physical Therapist from Early Intervention yesterday. We learned that even though Benjamin is medically looked at as being 3 weeks, some aspects such as muscle tone are more advanced since he has been dealing with gravity for 4 months. He can lift and move his head (and has been for 6-8 weeks) and can roll over when he is on his belly. His grip is super strong and so are his legs. She explained that micro preemies tend to have very strong muscles that push their limbs away from the body, where as full term babies have stronger muscles that pull their limbs close to the body. If given the choice, Benjamin would lay with his legs fully stretched and arms wide open, where as a full term baby would probably curl up a bit more. I was doing some of his arm stretches the other day and while stretching his arms over his head, he did a horizontal pull up! That's our strong little man!

Remember Benjamin's history with tube removal? Well he isn't so fond of his nasal cannula and has decided he had enough with it on more than one occasion. On Sunday Aunt Jenny and cousin Amy came to play for a couple hours so that mommy and daddy could go to church and Benjamin showed off his removal trick.

Here are a few more pictures of our active boy taken this morning.