Going home!

After we got through that last hiccup at the hospital, things went pretty smoothly with Trevor :) I stayed busy with all my baby showers that were supposed to take place BEFORE Trevor came haha! My best friends even had a shower for me on National Down Syndrome Day!

The pediatrician talked with the neonatologists at Primary's and they thought it would be fine for Trevor to go home that week on oxygen and with his feeding tube, if i was up for learning how to handle it all. But I wasn't feeling super comfortable with it, so we decided to keep him in the nursery. For a second there, we thought there was a possibility that he had pneumonia, which was scary. But thank goodness it turned out to be ok! Doctors, nurses, and therapists kept telling us that one day Trev would just decide he wanted to eat from a bottle and we would be home a couple days after that. We'd been in the hospital for so long that I wasn't sure if I believed them haha!

One super exciting thing was that one of Trevor's nurses let me take Trevor to MY room for a bit! I almost cried haha! It was a special occasion, though, because my sister-in-law had JUST got home from her mission like 2 hours before! Our whole family was so excited :)

The only thing that was still a little frustrating was that different nurses continued to have different ideas about what was best for Trev. We had gone from doing a bottle every two feedings to every other feeding. So he was using the NG less, which was good. But it was frustrating because it seemed that he would be wide awake when it was a scheduled tube feed, and really sleepy when he was supposed to take a bottle, and depending on the nurse, it was stick to the bottle/tube schedule. 

One day I expressed this to the speech pathologist who was checking on Trevor. She and her colleague, Dana )the physical therapist on Trevor's development team) were such a blessing! They were the only real consistency throughout the whole process. Jen (the speech pathologist) was there to help with all of his feeding and any possible issues that might come up with that eating (I never knew how important a baby's swallow, pacing, and suck/swallow coordination was until she came into the picture!). She agreed that it didn't make sense for us to tube feed him if he was awake and take a bottle, or try to force a bottle if he was tired! THANK YOU! So she talked to the nurse about making a little change to see if we could see any improvement. It was interesting to hear their conversation- the nurse did NOT agree with Jen but was trying to be polite about it haha Hilarious. WELL. That night, April 10th things started to change! Not only did Trevor take a full bottle, but we got to put him in clothes for the very first time EVER because his arm was all better! Jen had ordered another x-ray and things were great! I was so happy to see him clothed haha :) :)

Look at those dino toes!

He had also yanked his NG tube out and instead of replacing it, the nurses decided to take that as a sign of him not wanting it anymore haha! Excellent! Braxton and I went to bed so excited and prayed like crazy that he'd take the next feeding from a bottle, too. The next day I was a ball of nerves from feeding to feeding just hoping he'd keep it up! And he did! The next day we were gone a lot because we had Braxton's sister's homecoming talk. After church, Braxton's aunts and uncles kept asking when Trevor was going to come home, and we didn't tell anyone that he'd been doing well for the past 2 days! While we were gone the nurses tried to take him off oxygen to see if he could go home without it. He did really well for a couple hours, then his sats started to drop so he had to go back on it. So he would be going home with oxygen, but I was ok with that! That night the nurses did his car seat test and I was SO nervous! He needed to be able to sit in his car seat with oxygen, without his sats dropping below 90. If he failed, he'd have to have a special kind of "car seat" that was actually more like a bed, where he could lay down and keep his breathing under control. I made the nurses call me in the middle of the night to tell me how it went, and they called at 3 am to say that he was good to go! This was the LAST step in the process of him going home! I could not even BELIEVE this was happening :)

Tiniest little baby!

Before we left for church on Sunday for Kyrsti's homecoming

The next morning was the most amazing ever. It was crazy trying to get him ready. Mondays in the hospital are hectic as it is, but getting him discharged made it even more nuts haha An audiologist came to do his newborn hearing screen, which he didn't pass. So we would have to take him to Primary's once we got home to have a more accurate one. No big deal. After that, we just packed up his things and put him in his car seat and LEFT!

The morning of the big day!

Going home in the cutest outfit form Auntie Juliana!

It was like a parade as we walked past the nurses's station :) I just could NOT stop smiling and didn't start crying till I saw one of the other nurses crying haha! I've never been more nervous to drive in all of my life! Nerves nerves nerves. But we got home and it was just surreal! Braxton was at school and we just couldn't wait for him to get home later that day! Monday April 13, 2015 was the best day of my LIFE :)

En casa!!!

Wasting no time with Auntie and Corbin!