A+

Sol had an over all good week. I have been worried off and on that he might be getting sick, the cold May gave to everyone, but so far he hasn't really shown any signs that he is getting or got sick. I'm hopeful the breast milk did its job and kept him protected from the cold.
This week he has been gaining weight, his style, he has one day of a big amount and then a little smaller the next then very few grams the next until the next day big amount. He does his own little thing with that so.... Oh well as long as he is gaining. He is just about 7lbs 2oz, almost 2 pounds up from his birth weight. He did some more trach collar trials this week. First day was the 30mins and he did well so well they gave him an hour the next day. Maybe I've talked about this already.. But we did it right after ot/pt again and he wanted to sleep really bad about 40 mins into it.. At that point he was so close I tried to distract him until I needed to pump.. I put him down thinking it would wake him up but he ended up crying for the next 10 mins and the nurse told everyone it was because he got too tired doing the trial, he was tired from therapy, and he was crying, she thought he was struggling to breathe but she wasn't in the room and didn't know he had been crying for awhile already. I was going to try to clear this up with her but she went and told the neonatologist that he is too weak to do an hour long trial, she did this before I could even finish pumping. I know she is extra cautious and that is good but keeping up with telling doctors how weak he is is only going to cause him to have to show over and over again that he can do things so I am disappointed that she did this with out understanding exactly what was going on. Anyway because of what she said they switched him to 30mins 2x a day instead of an hour. He did so good earlier today and he gained 64grams last night, he will hopefully be bumped up again on the time regardless.

The boy is a daaaare devil! I am amazed by him every day. One night this week I called to check on him and the nurse asked if he liked being on his belly.. I said I don't know pt/ot haven't gotten there yet. She said oh well he js on his belly now and loving it. I was shocked... We never did it before I had no idea how he would handle it and really made me nervous but it seems like he did fine with it. I told the therapists the next day and they almost had a heart attack. They really want to be the ones to try new positions so they can see where his limbs are going and that he is being supported where he needs to be. So therapists decided they would put him on his tummy so they can see what he does.
They rolled him all the way around and manipulated him A LOT and he handled it amazingly. I was holding my breath and hardly watching in fear of him dropping his heart rate or oxygen levels, but he didn't. He got a little mad but calmed down after he got use to it. I agree with the nurse who put him on his tummy that it is nice to get him off his head.. But he doesn't have the best range to his neck just yet... So it is tricky!
Sol also got a belly binder this week, something that will help support his abdomen a little better, especially when he is going to be manipulated like going on tummy, or being moved to a bouncer, which he got to do today and he did very well with it!
He also had a bath in a tub this week... It was waaay too small and he was waaay crammed, so we will have to try again with a bigger tub next tito. He hated it other wise!

Today was a big day to me.. I did my first teach change on him. Man I hate trach changes sooo much. On the count of three we do the switch and when I went to put it in, I met a little resistance and couldn't get the trach in. I almost gave up and gave it to the nurse but told myself it HAS to go in so I pushed through the nerves and fumbled the trach in somehow. I was so nervous from it I could hardly stop my hands from shaking, but they said he never dropped from 100% while I was struggling to get it in. Again, the boy shocks me all the time.

Speech therapist told us she is still seeing improvements with him every day. She doesn't always see babies make improvements daily but usually weekly, but sol has been improving something every time she sees him. He is really learning quickly when she shows him things with his mouth. He is swallowing the best he can and we are noticing him having less and less secretions. He is closing his lips around swabs to get a good suck going, he smacks while sucking on the nuk, he is just doing an amazing job with his mouth. He has a long ways to go of course, but it is great he is getting stronger and not weaker.
I spent more time reading to him this week. He loves looking at everything, just like lua, so he loves the colorful pages in the books and he likes watching me read to him. I also realized that his biggest movement is in his legs and we need to maximize what he can do with them, if we do that, there could potentially be very few things he would not be able to do in life, things he can't do with his arms could be done with legs, at least enough to get by. So I was thinking how babies play with toys. I bought sol an elephant rattle long time ago and I decided to put it where I knew his legs could move it enough to make a sound. I had to show him a few times how to move his leg up and down and it would make a noise. He seemed to like it. So we kept doing it. I stopped and went back to it later, and even this morning, he knew exactly what to do, he actually brought his leg up and down to shake it, compared to me having to bring his leg back down for him. What a smarty pants. Speech therapist loved this! She said he gets an A+++ for today and all the things he is learning.

We had another teach class today and as well as this week has went, the class really overwhelmed me. I forget how stressful life is when you are at home with your baby that has a trach. I'm really nervous on how this will go and hope I have the strength to get though it, not the fake strength of I'm doing this because I know I have to and have no choice, but because I actually have the strength to do it. I'm nervous.. But as everyone as been telling us, we have lots of time.