Benigno Erasmo David

Two weekends ago, we went apple and pumpkin picking with Lola Peppy and Lolo Rico to enjoy a lovely New England weekend.  We had the intent of buying lots of apples and pumpkins, but we found the pumpkins too expensive and found that we couldn’t buy any less than a bushel of apples, which was way too much.  So instead, we had the BBQ and ice cream the farm was selling, and just walked around taking pictures of Ben.

When rooting, it appears Benig will try to eat anything, including tatay’s face.

Post-feed hiccoughs are still a sign of distress for Ben, according to the Early Intervention occupational therapists who visited him last week (as are sneezes and finger splaying). But he’s still so cute when he does any of those things.

We realize this is a bit of a redundant post, but we just got a new iPad app that lets us take videos and post it right onto the blog. We couldn’t help but video Ben in hiccoughing action to try this app out. Hooray for iPad apps! More videos to come in the future.

how sweet it was to bring ben home!

It’s been a week and a half now of having Ben home.  As our nurse warned us they would be, our days are even fuller than when we had to make time to visit the NICU, but in a much more joyful, exciting, amusing, and amazing way.  They’ve been so full that we haven’t had much time to post here.  Lawrence has managed to put up some pictures though.  I’ve included one below of what our full lives now look like at home- a mess, a learning experience, a lot of fun.

mom gave benig a bath for the first time this weekend.  he got pretty slippery — like a wet frog she said.

Ben ripped his NG tube out for the fifth and last time about four days ago.  He’s been feeding solely by bottle ever since!

In the middle of feeding a preemie a bottle of milk, one is supposed to pause the feed to burp the preemie. I think the rationale is to get out any air that he/she swallowed to make room for more milk and to make him/her more comfortable for the rest of the feeding.  Also, it gives preemies a small break from feeding, which is actually a vigorous activity for them.  At the end of feeds, we sometimes find Ben panting, as if he just had a workout.

I may be reading too much into this, but I think Ben relaxes when he’s being burped.  When I sit him up, his shoulders seem to slouch and he closes his eyes, getting into a zen moment (though he may just have no control over this, which is more likely).  Or maybe he’s just gearing up for the big ones he knows are coming.  Nurses have told us that he burps before his back is even patted and one nurse has gone as far as saying, “My God, he burps like a truck driver.” Burping, I guess, is one of Ben’s talents.

Preemies communicate often in ways other than crying. They do in fact cry to try to communicate a need, but they also have other ways of telling us they are in distress. These include hiccoughing, sneezing, and finger splaying. It took us a while to recognize that these things were signs of distress in Ben and instead found it cute when Ben sneezed, hiccoughed, or splayed his fingers. It probably has been making him even more stressed as he has come to realize that his parents find his stress cute. But look at the picture below of Ben with his splayed fingers. Isn’t he just so darn cute? How can one look like that and actually be stressed?

Ben has recently been moving to bottling more and more of my breast milk (and having fewer and fewer of his feeds given through the NG tube).  Feeding preemies by bottle is considered more challenging than full term babies since they are still in the process of learning to coordinate sucking, swallowing, and breathing.  If they manage to not coordinate that well, they’ll either take a big swallow or it goes down the wrong way.  As a result, they stop breathing and their heart rate goes down by 50-75%.

So when we feed Ben by bottle, we need to watch his every suck, swallow, and breathe to make sure he’s got it down.  We need to pace him by letting him suck on an empty nipple when he’s forgetting to breathe.  And when he doesn’t coordinate so well, we have to sit him up and burp him vigorously or have him lying prone in the air to help him recover and get the milk going down the right tube.  It’s exciting to get him to bottle, but also incredibly stressful every time we do it- we don’t want to let him drown in my milk.

That said, whenever he manages to coordinate sucking, swallowing, and breathing, Lawrence and I are super pumped.  We’ve even been starting to cheer him on during the feeds (as if he could understand what we are saying) and sending him positive mental energy (that might work better than cheering him on), hoping to somehow support him through his feed.  We mean well, but we do look pretty funny doing it.