Sunday, August 23, 2009

Halfway!


We've reached the halfway mark! Lawson has been home with us longer than he was in the NICU!! Since then we've been back to Duke many times for appointments and check ups. Just this week we had his hearing screening at Duke, which he passed. (Babies who've been on sustained ventilation have a much greater risk of hearing loss in the future.) This visit was over in record breaking time!! I was actually in disbelief when, after one procedure they said, "OK, you're all set." I jokingly said, "So we can go home now, right?" fully expecting to head back to the waiting room to wait for the next procedure. She said, "Yep, all done!" Thirty-one minutes from parking to returning to the car!!!

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Auntie Shel's Visit



Over the weekend, my sister and her husband were finally able to make it down to see Lawson. We've tried to schedule this a few times, but this was the first time they've gotten to visit since Lawson has been home. They're living in Alexandria, VA these days, much closer than Holland, so it's a little easier, but life still happens.

This was the first time Michelle had gotten to hold Lawson. She did get to see him once in the hospital; yes, we sneaked her in when they came to visit while he was still at Duke! ;) They got in on Saturday and only spent one night, but we had a blast! We hung out at home and enjoyed each other's company until dinner time. We decided to take Mike and Michelle to downtown Raleigh, since they've been to visit us many times, but have never been downtown. This was Lawson's first visit downtown as well. We had dinner at The Big Easy on Fayettville Street and then sat outside to enjoy the evening. A sweet lady driving a rickshaw rode up and started chatting with Lacey. In true Lacey style, she charmed the lady into a free rickshaw ride around downtown. :) We took a tour around the city and then headed home to get Lacey to bed, very late I might add! She only sees her auntie every once in a while, so we bend the rules a bit on the bedtime. Lawson sleeps whenever he feels like it, so it didn't bother him! lol

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Portraits






This week I decided that Lawson was well enough to finally have some portraits made. I called an old friend, Kitty Jones, who took some amazing portraits of Lacey when she was a baby. Ms. Kitty is the manager at JC Penny Portriat Studio at North Hills. She doesn't really take photos any more due to the time/stress constraints of the managerial position, but she makes the occasional exception. I'm glad she did; these are amazing! Thanks Kitty!
We're also planning to have some less formal family portraits made by another good friend, Nathan Schepker. I'll post those as soon as they're done. You can see his work at www.nathanspictures.com.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Time to Mourn

The time has come for me to mourn a loss. It happened quite a while ago, but we found out about it the day we were bringing Lawson home from the NICU. I haven't said anything about it yet but now it's painfully clear what a huge loss it was. Gallons of my breastmilk were lost. There's only enough milk for about 3 days left in our freezer. I'm still pumping and we're trying to breastfeed before each bottle, but I'm just not making enough milk to keep up. If you've been following my blog, you know how important is to me for Lawson to get my milk.

Early on, I was pumping and freezing all my milk, since Lawson wasn't able to eat for weeks and when he finally was, he was getting very small amounts. So of course I had a TON of milk to store. There were bins in the refridgerators in the NICU for moms to store milk and mine was stuffed full, as was our freezer at home. So we asked Brian's brother to store a huge bag of milk (I'm talking large cooler full of little bottles.) in the big chest freezer at his house in Apex. After that the milk just kept piling up, so we finally broke down and bought our own large chest freezer for our garage. We kept saying we needed to head to Apex and pick up the milk they were storing for us but trips to Duke just kept getting the better of us. So the day we finally brought Lawson home from the NICU, Brian called to let them know he would come and get it, only to find out that it was gone! There had been some serious storms that caused their electricity to go off long enough for much of the milk to thaw out. The 'safety rules' of storing breastmilk say that once milk has been thawed it cannot be refrozen.

I cried so hard when Brian told me about it, but I figured everything would be fine. However, since we've been home, it's been harder to pump as often as I should, so my milk supply has really suffered. I found an awesome product called 'More Milk Plus' which really helped, but not enough. It's just a fact, no product in the world will help if you don't pump on schedule. I know the day is in sight when my milk will run out and Lawson will have to take a few bottles of just formula. I'm really sad about that, but there's just not enough hours in the day to pump as often as I need to to keep up with the demand.