Big week, big month.

Mea culpas first, correction second, update third.

As noted before, it's getting harder and harder to justify the time necessary to post updates, as when I'm at the hospital I want to play with Woody and interact and hold him. Beyond that, Maggie and I have had so many visitors over the last couple of weeks (Jeff two weeks ago, Krista last week, Jared this week, my dad and Sherri last weekend) that other time that I might spend getting caught up on updates got spent visiting with people in, as the kids say, meatspace.* Oh, and Saturday night I went and camped out to get an early start for some absolutely intensely amazing trout fishing. Which was worth it.

Correction: Nurse S brought to my attention that I was misinformed last week about Woody's age. He is not the oldest child or oldest boy in the unit. He is #4 currently and the #2 boy. The oldest boy is Child Named After The Last Name Of Local Hockey Star, who is older than Woody by 2 days.

The update: Let's start with statistics, shall we? Woody is now somewhere in the neighborhood of 3550 grams, or 7 pounds 14 ounces, for those who talk American. He had his first blood gas in a week this morning, which revealed that his PCO₂ is down to 58, and his bicarb is inching down to 31. These scores are awesome. He's also starting to come down on the high-flow cannula pressure, so in other words he's getting less and less pressure support for his lungs, making them do more work, especially on the inhale. Woody was on a pressure of 7 liters/minute on the CPAP; when he went to the cannula he was on 4, and he went to 3 and is going down to 2 today. Since he's going down on the air forced down his windpipe, that means that we can work on the eating thing. So at 2 o'clock today he gets to try eating out of a bottle for the first time. We are trying to temper our expectations, but it's still a big deal.

In other news, Woody's official adjusted due date is... tomorrow, so he'll be full term then. He'll be 120 days old later this week, which means he gets his next round of immunizations. And he gets his kidneys re-imaged later today, so we'll see if they have done good things recovering from his earlier hydronephrosis.

All looks very well in all facets of his life, and we're just as happy as could be possible about his health. He's very smart and bright-eyed, and it's so much fun to see his brain starting to develop and work, and seeing him get a little better at small things like controlling his muscle movement and coordinating his eyes and stuff like that. He's been on a major roll for the last month, and that's been great because as preemies get close to term their brain develops and it's important to be able to work on developmental issues instead of putting that off to keep their vitals stable. Thanks for your interest and care.


*As opposed to 'cyberspace', see.