The Final Countdown!!!



http://youtu.be/9jK-NcRmVcw

 

Well, I got the call this morning that Axel had a great night last night and that at this point he is on target to spring from this joint tomorrow morning!!!  Very exciting news for all of us!  I have to admit, I was a bit nervous when I met the night nurse last night... she had been his night nurse the night before and he didn't do so hot.   I knew that his 48 hours had started at 6am yesterday morning (since he didn't eat well for the night nurse) and I was putting all of my trust in this woman to ensure that he continued with some good eats.   Ben and I came in to see him at 9pm and she walked in and says, "Hi... so, I hear you are much better at getting him to eat than I am.".

Awesome.

So Ben and I started telling her some tips and tricks we'd figured out with him and I almost fell over when she said she didn't do some of the more basic things that we learned on day one of this situation.  I told Ben that if I came in this morning and he had gone backwards, I was going to go psycho on someone.

Luckily for this nurse, he did great last night. :)  Could it be due to the motivation of Sheila's infamous peanut butter balls?  Perhaps.  As I said in a previous post, it's always good to bribe the nurses.

So notice anything different in these two pics?
This is his amazingly handsome 2 Week Old pic... he looks so serious, as if he's pondering how he's going to... 

REMOVE HIS FEEDING TUBE!  HOORAY!!!! 

I came in this morning and asked the nurses if that would be removed today and they smiled and said, "Oh, Axel took care of that already this morning".  Ooops... say it with me, people!  WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' FEEDING TUBE!!!

One of the other requirements for him to be discharged was to pass the car seat test.  They need to ensure that since he's so little, he can support himself enough that it doesn't impact his ability to breathe.  This is what I walked in to find in the NICU this morning.  

Seriously?  It's like cuteness on a stick.  

So we are counting down the hours until we can go home and change a diaper without wires to work around.  SCORE.

So now we move on to the next topic to tackle.   The dogs.

Many of you have met our dogs.  For those of you who haven't, we have two great danes, Sebastian and Delilah.   Sebastian is the most mellow creature on the planet, he doesn't have a care in the world.  Just a really cool, chill dog.

Delilah, on the other hand...  She's a very sweet girl, a bit neurotic, and she LOVES her dad.  No, I mean, really.  She LOVES her dad.  Because she is a bit neurotic, we have taken her a few times to see a Dog Behaviorist.  I call her Delilah's therapist.  We found out that a root cause of Delilah's neurosis stems from the fact that...

She is in love with Ben and thinks that he's her mate.  I am just another dog in the pack.  Awesome.

This was announced in front of a group of people and I have never seen my dog look prouder and my husband quite so red.

But really, I don't know why she would think this... 

We had Delilah's "therapist" come over for a session last week to help us prepare Delilah for the harsh reality that there would be another little person in her house.   She gave us homework, of which one of the items is to play sounds of Infants crying while we are gone so that she gets used to that sound.  Poor dog, we put Spotify on and found an album called "Baby sounds for Dogs" or something.. and we put it on the laptop on our coffee table. 

Poor dog.  Her ears perked up and she was looking around, trying to figure out where this horrible sound was stemming from.  Even got up and looked UNDER the coffee table, trying to find the ghost baby.  No luck.  So we put this on for a while each day and let her go a little more nutty.  

We took home some of Axel's clothes from the hospital to wash and let her and Sebastian smell them.  Sebastian couldn't care less.  Delilah sniffed like she was doing a wine tasting and then proceeded to come straight to me and started sniffing my incision site.  Weird.   Whether intentional or not I do not know, but she hasn't done that since!  

So I'm sure you will be hearing more about this next part of the process... we have other homework, such as "the dogs cannot sleep in the master bedroom anymore"... 

THEY ARE GOING TO BE SO MAD.  But, I'm sure that when they meet him they will get over it. 

I sincerely hope that my next post is written from the comfort of my home and not a sterile hospital room.  I absolutely adore the nurses here that we have met and learned SO much from... but I hope to never see them again. :)




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