Rest up, Lily!

After a stressful couple of days, Saturday and Sunday were relatively quiet which was nice.

Cora has started getting the hang of taking her milk by mouth which is great! She's currently getting 46ml of milk at mealtimes and just this afternoon she took 40ml from a bottle! She's been having longer stretches of being awake and alert which is very fun. Other than that she's her usual quiet, low maintenance, self.

Lily...where to start. After her, essentially, emergency surgery to replace her G tube the NICU surgeon was cautious for her to go in for heart surgery since they had to give her blood thinners. The possibility of having the surgery become open heart surgery in the event of coarctation wouldn't be good if she had the blood thinners in her system. However, we just found out this morning that Lily's PDA has mostly closed itself in the last couple of days! That's really good news for several reasons. The PDA being mostly closed and not resulting in coarctation means the surgery will not be open heart, so they can proceed with surgery on Monday morning as planned.

(Side note, they are not concerned about any infection since all blood tests are still clean and she hasn't had any fever or heart rate issues since that one time.)

Since they don't have to worry about coarctation they will go through her chest for the pulmonary banding and fully close off the PDA, instead of going through her side which they would have done so that they could correct any coarctation that might occur. Sorry if that's all confusing, I'm not a medical professional so my explanation might not be on point, but the short version is - it's good news!

Lily's surgery is scheduled for 7:30am tomorrow. We will need to be at the hospital about an hour early so it's going to be a long day for Mom and Dad. Between pre-op, surgery, and post-op, we're figuring about three hours. Lily will be intubated and on a ventilator for the surgery. After surgery, she'll go to the cardiac floor for observation and care until they're confident her heart and lungs are functioning well and she can come off the ventilator. After that, however long it takes (days?), she will get moved back down to the NICU - *hopefully* to the same unit we are in now as we are rather attached to the nursing staff who have taken care of Cora and Lily these last two weeks.

Rosie is still very much attached to her baby doll, which only started after she met her baby sisters. Coincidence? I don't think so. It's very cute! It's amazing how big she seems after spending day after day with our premie twins. She's such a toddler, in all the most adorable ways. Talking, learning new words every day. Running back and forth across the house, with no end to the energy in sight. Growing into her big sister role by helping clean up "uckies" off the floor, practicing changing diapers on her baby dolls, closing doors for us, and providing us endless laughs at her antics.

Prayer Requests:

• For Cora to continue to get the food-by-mouth process down so she can gain weight and go home!
• For Lily's heart surgery to go well.
• For Joe, as I'll be going back to work Tuesday and have to figure out how to fit work, hospital, Rosie, and sleep into one day.
• For Heidi and Joe, as we try and wrap our heads around what our lives will be like for the next, potentially, 6 or so months.
• For Rosie, as her formerly predictable little world is getting turned upside down right now.

We will put out an update as soon as we can tomorrow after the surgery.

Wrapping up, here's a cute little song that I stumbled across this afternoon that is sure to get stuck in your head.

Daddy and (some of) his girls

Cora in a food coma

Blurry picture of Lily, as feisty as ever

Rose passed out with baby after a fun afternoon with Oma and Papa