Celebrating Cooper but mourning Lucy

Starting with the non-Coop news - yesterday we had to say goodbye to our first baby, Cooper's big sister, our beloved dog, Lucy McBeaglepants. We had a wonderful 11 years with her, and it was incredibly hard and emotional to make the decision to let her go. While we desperately wanted her to meet her new baby brother, it just wasn’t meant to be. We did give her a blanket with his scent which she snuggled with for the past couple days, so she knew.

Of course, this made it hard to focus on Cooper, when we couldn't stop crying about Lucy. But we realized we needed to shove down our feelings to give our attention to him for at least a little while yesterday. They made an exception to allow both of us to come in together to meet with the feeding therapist. She showed us how to feed him a bottle, given his unique needs at the moment.

I feel like I need at least four hands to do this properly! When I came back in the late afternoon and tried it again, I just couldn't get it right, and he wouldn't suck. I handed him to the nurse and he drank it right down. I couldn't help feeling like a completely inadequate mother in that moment. I am trying to show myself some grace, though. I know this is their job, and I'm just learning. But it still doesn't feel good. I somehow expected that I would just develop some special mom-sense and figure out how to do this. But like anything else, the truth is that it probably takes practice. My mom reminded me of when I started marching band in high school and I was so stressed out that I'd never be able to march and play at the same time! 

Cooper was dropping his oxygen saturation again, so they had to turn the cannula back on. He wanted no part of it, though, so he was pulling it out constantly and putting it in places it definitely did not belong.

Your oxygen is not a headband, bro.

In terms of eating, he took all of his 5 ml bottles by mouth for the rest of the day! They bumped him up to 9 ml bottles at the 9 pm feed, and Super Dad got him to take most of it by mouth until he got super sleepy, and then they gave him the rest through his feeding tube. Of course, after his "big" dinner the little punk pulled that out too!

Not much else to report for yesterday. We asked the NP on yesterday what she were thinking about a potential discharge date, and she was much more optimistic and said maybe as soon as next week. So...I just don't know who to believe anymore! I guess the bottom line is that he'll come home when he's good and ready, and we should just stop trying to predict anything.

And now, please enjoy a video of Cooper with the hiccups.