Calder Eats

Calder continues to make strides towards going home....eventually.
The last couple of days his sucking reflex has really kicked in full force.  On Monday, he was cuing like crazy.  Had his fist in his mouth, sucking on the air, tongue out, turned his head if you touched his cheek, WIDE AWAKE before feeding started.  So, on Monday afternoon we went ahead and gave him 5mL in a bottle to see if he was talented and coordinated enough to suck, swallow and breath all at the same time.  He did a great job!  So, later on we let him try to nurse.  Again, great work...nursed for 25 minutes.  This was a shocking amount of time for a first outing.

Tuesday afternoon he took a bottle with 20mL!  Huge!
On Tuesday night he took every. single. feed. by bottle.  TWO of them were the full feed.
This kid is a porker.

Wednesday morning, again, the entire feed by bottle at 9am.

Our favorite nurse stopped by and said, "umm...you might want to get ready for him to come home sooner than we had originally anticipated."  She also backed that up with, "of course, this is the NICU so it could be that he stops eating anything for the next two weeks and we're back to square one."  Because THAT is what the NICU is all about.  One step forward, one step back.  But, it's super fun to see him eating!  We have pictures of his first bottle that I will put up later today.

Another first...Calder will get his first bath today!  Which is a good thing because he smells like sour milk due to a few spit up episodes this last week.