I can hardly believe that Caden is 26 days old all ready! Genevieve’s entire NICU stay was 22 days, so the fact that we are over that is kind of surreal. Last night we picked up my brother from the airport so we took him along with us to see Caden. Caden’s eyes were open the entire time, as you can see from the adorable picture to the left! And Daniel was able to lift Caden for his bed change without any blankets. Daddy really enjoyed that. 
Caden’s vent settings last night were excellent, he was at 28%. They are doing his echo today we found out, so hopefully that will come back okay so they can start weaning him from his morphine and nitric oxide. Since his oscillator settings are getting so low it’s time to consider bringing him down to a CPAP system that will be easier on his lungs. We have to see how he does weaning from his other medicines first though. This would be a great change, because mommy and daddy haven’t even “officially” held Caden yet. We can’t wait to cuddle and actually hold our little guy. Hard to imagine he’s a month old and hasn’t been in our arms yet. He weighed in at 1170 grams last night, so about 2 lb. and 9 1/2 oz. He’s feedings are going a little bit better. He’s getting about 3 cc’s every 6 hours and 1/2 the time there will be residuals and 1/2 the time not. The morphine really slows down their digestive system so this isn’t unexpected.
In other news, we were finally able to see Caden’s mouth and lip a bit better yesterday, and it looks like he only has an incomplete bilateral cleft lip on both sides! This means that the split in his lip on both sides doesn’t extend all the way up into his nostril. We were quite surprised to see that on both sides he has a bit of skin below his nostril, which explains his perfect looking nose. In kids with complete cleft lips that extend and open into the nostril area their noses are often a bit off or deformed. If you’d like to see the difference between a complete cleft and an incomplete you can see a medical picture here – Complete Cleft and Incomplete Cleft. Just picture that on both sides for a bilateral cleft like Caden has. You can see what I’m talking about with Caden’s incomplete cleft in the large Caden Pic #1 I posted at the bottom of this post.
Adessa is feeling much better. Just a 24 hour thing and she’s back to her old entertaining self. We love our cutie pie!
Also, we’ve had quite a few people requesting large pictures so that they can print them off of Caden. Below I’ve attached some links to large pictures that you can adjust to the size you need for printing.
April 14th, 2011 at 4:26 am
I would really love to guest post on your blog.*:~`’