Dinner time

Here I am giving Ella her dinner. You can see her pod here in the NICU in the background. She has her own pod right now, and there are 2 guests per pod, so for now we can have 4 visitors at the same time to visit the girls. Once they move both incubators to the same pod then we'll be limited to only two guests. (Big Sisters don't count against our total - they always get in for free!)

Over my shoulder is her LCD with all of her vitals. They monitor the preemies all of the time. Mostly they are checking to make sure the babies do not stop breathing. Very early babies can stop breathing long enough that it can also impact their heart rate. When that happens the nurses come over and rub the baby and that usually gets them to breathe again. Fortunately Ella and Julie have not had any of those episodes.

I'm doing a gavage feeding for Ella. They wire a tube through her nose down to their stomach, and feed them by attaching a bottle with their formula. The gravity drips it right down, and the babies do not need to even wake up. Before the next feeding the nurse will create a little vacuum in the tube to check to see how much is still left in the stomach. Sometimes the stomach has not had enough time to process all the food so they know not to add quite so much the next time.