Friday 12/5/14

So it has been a couple of days...  

Good to see everyone again!  Our baby girl has continued to be challenging on the feeding front.  She does not seem to be intresred in feeding from the bottle. She taking on average 15-20 mls by mouth every feeding and the rest funnels through the feeding tube.  

She does continue to "root" for the bottle but she just hasn't figured out what to do after that. 

For those of you familer with the Jersey Shore reality show they had thier own acronym for thier daily routine.  GTL -- Gym, Tan, Laundry... 

Here in the NICU we have our our mantra for Ava -- Suck, Swallow, Breath!!!  And around here there is a special Friday event that takes place for all babies who are in the unit -- Foodie Fridays!!

Sarah did her best at trying to pump as much milk as possible, but her boobs were not made for walking...  So we had to find another source. Ava clearly did better on the breast milk than anything else we tried, so we needed to find an outlet for breast milk.

WHO KNEW THERE WAS A BLACK MARKET FOR BREAST MILK!!!

We had a couple friends who recently had babies who were pumping a large amount and had a stockpile of milk. So I loaded up the boys and drove to thier house and picked up the goods.  

They have been a huge help and it helped us to know that Ava did 10x better on breast milk than any other formula. So the next obstacle was where do we find more??  

Meet our newest bestest friend Kayla!!  

She is a hairstylist from Colorado that we found through a breast milk bank.  She has recently had a child and produces over 100 ounces a day.  Couldn't help it but this is what comes to mind...

She sent us a motherload of breast milk yesterday that will last us about a week and a half.  She deep freezes each bag then ships it in an insulated box with dry ice.  The dry ice keeps everything frozen for a maximum of three days when it is cold through the winter, so shipping costs are not outragous. 

Ava is taking to the breast milk better already and in a much better place.

Sorry for not posting any updates the past couple days, we have been trying to figure out how the whole breast milk situation was gonna work out. 

But we do have a very happy little girl and she continues to trend in the right direction!!