Updates

First, some updates on Esther...

• We have been to see her in the NICU for a few hours each day. We like the facility and the staff--we feel very confident with our baby there.
• The nurse said that today Esther's chest x-ray looks much better than yesterday's, which is a great sign.
• Esther is now being fed through a tube in her nose that goes down to her stomach, instead of through an IV. I have been pumping milk for her but I'm not yet producing enough to cover all her feedings. Hopefully my supply will pick up in the next few days so she won't have to be supplemented with formula for long.
• Between yesterday's visit and today's, she was stable enough to get really cleaned up for the first time. (Initially she was not healthy enough for a bath so her hair was still yucky and matted from birth.) Now she is even prettier. :)
• She has been put on a ten day course of antibiotics, so she will remain in the NICU for at least that long.
• We got to hold her for the first time today. It was so good to be close to her. Unfortunately, she didn't tolerate it very well. She cried quite a bit and her pulse-oxygen saturation went down below where it needs to be, so the nurse told us she needed to go back in the isolette. Even our small bit of handling was just too much stress for her today.

Updates on Esther's mommy...

• It is so incredibly hard to not be able to hold your child as much as you want, to know that it is actually less healthy to do so than to leave her alone. I think having to put her back in the isolette this afternoon was the hardest part of this experience so far.
• I am rather emotional, which shouldn't be surprising. But I feel much better today (I cried maybe once an hour) than yesterday (I cried maybe every 10 minutes or so). I really feel God's mercy sustaining me in the harder moments.
• I feel like everything we went through a few weeks back, being so uncertain about what the echogenicity on Esther's ultrasound meant, really prepared us for the experience of having her in the NICU. We came face to face with the worst-case scenarios lung problems could be. Now we do indeed have a baby with lung problems and it's not nearly as bad as we once thought it could be, so I look at Esther every day and genuinely feel thankful for all the ways that she is healthy.
• Physically, I feel pretty good. This morning, as I went about my relatively normal routines, it was strange to think that if Esther wasn't in the NICU I would have still been in the hospital. With all the trips to Pittsburgh we are making, it is a challenge to "rest as much as possible" as I'm supposed to. (But I'm sure that's the case for any second time mom.)

Time for a few pictures!