Grandma Gloria, meet Anne

Love at first sight.

How to bathe a tiny preemie in 30 easy steps

Grandma Gloria arrived just in time for Anne's first bath at home ...

Welcome home!

Big news, everyone: Our peanut has come home! She weighed 4 pounds, 5 ounces on Monday, the day she was discharged. On Tuesday, she met her new pediatrician, who was as charmed by her as her friends in the Special Care Nursery were. ("I like her!" was the doctor's verdict.)

Our challenges now are helping her eat to gain weight, which is going VERY well so far, and helping her with her reflux, which is going fairly well. She's sleeping and napping in her carseat to keep her very upright, and her doctor has prescribed baby Zantac, which seems to be helping.

So far, we have her on the same schedule the hospital did. Lucky Mom and baby -- Daddy is good at keeping us all on a schedule. He's making sure Mom eats and has time to sleep and making decisions such as that the carseat is the best place for this kid to get some rest. He's also Mr. Patient, which Mom is grateful for. We are two lucky girls.

Wish us luck! We will keep you posted. Thanks, everyone, for all the good wishes and prayers.

The pictures show Anne striking her favorite pose with Dad at home and Anne's friends at the Special Care Nursery sending her off.

Beauty sleep

Brunch with Dad

Two cute pictures of our big girl

Anne weighs 4 pounds, 2.5 ounces now. And Mom brought new hats to the Special Care Nursery today, including the strawberry one from Grandma Gloria.

Four pounds of fun

Peanut was 4 pounds, 1 ounce as of Wednesday night. She struggled to finish one of her bottles with Mom yesterday, but her doctors and nurses are still very optimistic she will continue to eat well.

Why is this baby kicking up her heels?

A. She has been moved from her incubator to a big-girl bed.
B. Her feeding tube has been removed -- keep your fingers crossed it stays out!
C. She weighs 3 pounds, 15 ounces as of last night.
D. She has a fresh diaper on.
E. All of the above!

From the archives: Anne's arrival

We thought you might enjoy these pictures of the night Anne was delivered. She had a great day today -- ate almost her whole bottle from Mom, and is up to 3 pounds, 13.8 ounces.

Click here to view these pictures larger

Daddy's little girl

Make that Daddy's little eater! Dad visited Anne today without Mom, who came down with a cold and needs to stay home to keep from making our peanut sick.

After eating her 8 a.m. feeding all by herself, Anne was ready for more when Dad arrived, and she wasted no time yelling at all involved when the next meal was slow in coming! She sucked most of her bottle down hungrily, then fell fast asleep once her belly was full.

Mom will stay home again Monday and will hopefully be back in the saddle on Tuesday. After avoiding friends and neighbors and public places for fear of bringing germs into the Special Care Nursery, Mom has become what she feared most! Sick!

Somebunny loves her ...

What can a daddy do when he has to head back to work? Today, Anne's daddy sent a pal to give her lots of bunny hugs and kisses.

She's zonked out in this picture because she had eaten three bottles in a row all on her own before Mom arrived this morning, so it didn't take much to wear her out!

Hose-free ... for a few minutes

A rare tube-free picture. Her nurse pal decided Anne needed a little break from her tube, which makes her nose stuffy.

3 pounds, 8.7 ounces

That's what our cupcake weighed tonight. Steadily gaining!

FAQ: All about Anne

Here are answers to some common questions about our peanut.

Q: When is she coming home?
A: When she's gaining weight steadily and eating all on her own, from the bottle and directly from Mom. We don't know when that will happen; she's still supposed to be inside Mom! But she's making great strides and now eats much more on her own than goes through her tube.

Q: What's up with the blonde hair?
A: No clue! But Dad had blonde hair as a little boy.

Q: What color are her eyes?
A: Blue for now, like most babies, but that's likely to change. Lots of brown eyes and green eyes in both our families.

Q: Why is she sleeping on her tummy in one of the early photos? Isn't that bad for babies?
A: Don't try this at home. It's only OK when she's hooked up to a monitor that checks her breathing, heart rate and oxygenation, and when there are several nurses and a doctor to keep an eye on her.

Q: What's her personality like?
A: Sleepy. Easy to calm when she fusses, probably because she tires so easily. But we're told that preemies become very different babies once they pass their due dates and are at home!

Q: Don't you think she's a pretty baby?
A: Absolutely!

From the Archive: May 10, 2010

We keep telling everyone that we'll post more and better videos - hang with us, gang, we're still trying to get that nailed down (Dan has taken a page from Ken Burns with the lengthy, documentary-style video for each clip; apparently, they need to be 30 seconds or less, and to the point).

So, in the meantime, we're opening the vault for another glimpse into the official archives.* What you're looking at here is the bucket the nurses use to warm Anne's milk. As you can tell, the nurses wanted to dress things up a bit (a habit of theirs), and that's what they did with the fancy-pants styling for Anne's name on the pitcher - I thought you'd find it worth a look. (Also, if you look closely, you'll see the pitcher sticker bearing the hospital's official moniker for this baby, which is "Babygirl Quaid").

Blog fans, worry not: the "e" in Anne's name is not missing - it's just out of frame, and per Sibley Hospital policy, the baby is listed with mom's last name as "Quaid" while she's in the hospital.

We'll keep you posted.

*(The US National Archives are not sponsors of this blog).

Ciao, baby

Oops, I mean, Chow Baby: Since we last posted, Anne has been on the march when it comes to eating.

Over the weekend of May 8, she took three of four, 30cc feedings entirely from her bottle. That means she's at least trying to make a go of it with the "suck-swallow-breathe" thing needed to use a bottle full time.

All of this reminds me of when I learned swimming strokes as a kid; the instructors would say a stroke required a pattern of movement in the water - "pull, breathe, kick, glide" - and I'd spend days kicking around, gulping lots of water, thinking I might drown, and generally working at it. But after awhile, I'd get efficient, and stronger in swimming the stroke.

I feel like that's what's happening with Anne: she's working on the bottle, and she's inefficient with it, but she just needs a little time to get the hang of it. In the meantime, Anne's doing well on the "suck" portion of the equation - today, she had a thirty-minute session with the pacifier ("passie," in Sibley nurse parlance).

We'll keep you posted.

WEIGHT, WEIGHT - DON'T TELL ME! We've fielded lots of questions about the baby's weight. Hear ye, hear ye, the official total is: 3 pounds, 4 ounces, well above birth weight.

Clearly, eating is much on the minds of the doctors. Eating is also much on the mind of dad, who wrote this post while thinking of Listrani's*, the Italian joint around the corner from the hospital where we often lunch on one of their excellent pasta or salad dishes between baby feedings.

(Listrani's is not a corporate sponsor of this blog, and no babies were harmed in the writing of this post).

More Pop-Up Video

All, as promised, here's a video of Libby singing to Anne. Here's a special offer: we'll send an exclusive, from-the-archives photo not available anywhere else, if you can name the tune Libby's singing. (Incentive: the photo is disgustingly cute, so listen close!).

The bigger eat

We thought eating 7 ccs on her own was a big deal. But when we got to the Special Care Nursery today, Anne was obviously hungry and ready to eat. She was wide-eyed, opening her mouth and sticking out her tongue. And when Mom offered the bottle, she eagerly started sucking down the milk. In all, she ate 20 ccs for Mom and Dad before the rest went through her tube. That's huge!

And when we left, she was an hour away from her next meal, but she was hungry already and sucking so hard on her pacifier, we could hear her through the isolette where she sleeps.

(She also protested loudly when Mom undressed her for some skin-to-skin time. We don't like to upset her, but we love hearing the sounds of a healthy, alert baby. She's cute even when she cries.)

Here are pictures of Anne yesterday with her No. 1 fan. We promise to do our best to take some pictures of our peanut with her eyes open as soon as we can!   

The big eat

Little Miss is still so teeny, she doesn't have much energy for eating. It's hard work coordinating the suck-breathe-swallow movements needed for eating!

Her nurse pals usually offer a bottle before feeding her through the tube in her nose to help her associate eating with that nice sleepy full feeling she gets afterward. Anne sometimes manages to get about 5 ccs down before the other 25 ccs goes through her tube.

But today when mom tried feeding her, she sucked down 7 ccs relatively quickly and fairly energetically! And she seemed to be indicating she was hungry just before feeding time.

Baby steps. Preemie baby steps!

Here are pictures from yesterday and today. Dad thinks her face is starting to fill out.

OK, here's the inaugural video of the baby, which was taken because we wanted to provide an opportunity to actually hear Anne, and see her in action. With apologies, the clip is nearly a week old - I point that out because at the time it was taken, she got all upset about diaper changes, which really doesn't happen at this point. Oh well, she still sounds the way she does in the video - I've literally heard her from outside her specialty care unit and thought to myself: "That's my kid." As a last thought, listen for when the nurse refers to "dad," who is clearly clueless. The nurse is the incredible Dierdre, who helped me out when Libby was off her feet and I did the holdings at feeding time. More and better videos coming - we'll keep you posted.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

From Dan: Anne's birth generated a small (mostly pink) garden last week, and I thought you might like to see that. I'll have a couple of other good photos from the vault to share this week.

We've gone wireless (well, almost)

Today's update from Dan:

With this report (a belated one - sorry), I'm pleased to say that Anne has ditched all the wires, machines, bleepers, gee-gaws and hoo-ha's that have been pumping and humming around her to date. Only the nose-hose remains, plus a tiny wrapping around the baby's left foot that monitors her heart rate and such.

Gone are the electrolyte line, plus another line that had some kind of fats in it. Also, the jaundice-related lights are gone and today, the nurses took off the ear-patches that held the light-protection goggles onto her head with Velcro.

Anne's taking only mom's milk, plus formula now, which is delivered every three hours at 30ccs per serving. On a related note, she's also doing a great job of holding down all that food, keeping her temperature steady, and looking cute through it all.

So, as I write this, we're about three hours out from Anne's one-week birthday (!), and her progress has been tremendous. All we need her to do is eat, sleep and grow, which she seems to have set about doing; as of today, Anne weighed in at more than her birth weight - quite a milestone.

The requests for new photos are starting to come in again, so I've attached a couple that show Anne when she was over the jaundice light (the nurses drew fakew eyelashes on her goggles!), as well as images of the recent quality time spent with mom and dad.

Lastly, we've just about got a blog ready to go, where you'll be able to see photos, updates and even videos of the baby, so you can see her in action, and actually hear what she sounds like. That should be ready tomorrow.

We'll keep you posted.

Bigger than birth weight

When we visited our little cupcake today, one week after she was born, we learned she now weighs more than her birth weight! That's quite a milestone. As most babies do, Anne lost at least a couple of ounces after she was born.

It took some time for her friends in the Special Care Nursery to work up to full feedings for her, although she was up to full feedings by Saturday. She's so little and still so young, she can't quite coordinate the suck-breathe-swallow motions she needs to eat. So while she practices at the beginning of some feedings, most of her food is coming through the hose in her nose.

(That tube is actually pretty neat, once you get over seeing your little girl with a tube in her nose. It lets the nurses check to see how much food has been digested. Of course, diapers provide some information, too.)

What is she eating? Half or more of her food is coming from mom. Whew! That's hard work. The rest is formula fortified with a few extra calories to help her grow.

Anne had some quality skin-to-skin time with Mom today, which put her right to sleep after Dad "fed" her by holding the syringe that drips food into her tube.