Getting Smaller

The biggest evident change for Gabriel this week was small. We moved him from the large to the medium nipple hole. (Small is the normal size.) His sucking strength is now mostly up to the medium hole.

In many feedings he chokes on the milk, but only coughs a maximum of two times, and rather weakly, and with worse breathing ability following, making us think that he may be getting some milk into his lungs often.

He continues to make small gains in strength, responsiveness etc.

He came thru Chinese New Year without a single response to all the loud booms. It makes me think this response that one day to two sounds was indeed a sign of a healing to come.

The biggest change for us is that with his overall breathing gradually improving, while we are still sleeping in shifts, the caretaker can now sleep between feedings without worrying too much. So our sleep deprivation has decreased.

How do you dry diapers in rainy season when you can’t get them beyond damp? We faced that problem the last few days. I tried wearing one as a shawl, but that was a very slow drying process. (Sorry, no pictures available.) The solution I finally came up with was to hang three diapers at a time on the back of the refrigerator – our only useful source of heat. They dried just quickly enough to keep ahead of Gabriel. Now the sun has come back out and the diapers are drying properly on the line.

Prayer Focus

Keep praying for growth for Gabriel:

Ps 92:12 The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.

One other thing we’ve been impressed to pray for is breaking bands/bonds:

Ps 107:14 He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death

And broke their bands apart. ... 20 He sent His word and healed them

      

Hitting The Bottle

Gabriel is surviving without his feeding tube. While he had the feeding tube, his usual high of feeding by bottle was 30ml/feeding. When he started on bottle feeding only (with a large hole), he went up to 60ml. Now he regularly takes in 80ml/feeding, which is about what he needs. His breathing is still bad, so often as he drinks it seems to be a contest between ingesting food and inhaling air, one that he mainly has to juggle and struggle with.

Along with bottle feeding we have encountered another first: he is burping for the first time in the last few days. (Tube feeding doesn’t introduce a lot of air, and when it does, sometimes the air comes back out the tube.) Last night I saw him spit up for the first time (yes, the first time – mama hasn’t seen it yet), probably because I didn’t think to try to burp him after feeding. A while back we were praying for him to learn to cough – rather a necessity when bottle feeding – and now he has that one down pretty well. For someone born with no ability to cry he’s doing pretty well in that department as well.

So far sucking on those two strange objects on his mother’s chest has not struck his fancy. Oh well, most men suffer from too much fascination with those objects anyway.

Twice when Gabriel has received group prayer, his milk intake immediately went up (as witnessed by being hungry early after the very next feeding). The last time he got group prayer the next day he ended up shifting to bottle feeding only. So it seems that prayer answers to date have focused on milk intake. That makes us think the Lord wants to focus on his growth.

Prayer Focus

We would like to focus prayer on his growth for the next several weeks, both bodily growth, and crucially, brain and skull growth and head reshaping. We have no appointments for 2 wks, so we will not have any immediate feedback on his growth.

-          Papa

Off The Feeding Tube (Tues 2012-01-17)

On Sun. (2012-01-15) Gabriel yanked out his feeding tube from his nose (formerly in his mouth) for the umpteenth time. Since he had begun doing some oral feeding (still small amounts), we decided to try feeding him completely orally, with prayer for increased sucking & swallowing power. So far his volumes are running well behind the tube-feeding volumes, and are marginal, but it looks like he might make it without the feeding tube, and with bottle nipples with large holes to reduce the sucking power needed. It is very nice to not have the feeding tube in the way all the time, and to have to keep putting on Gabriel’s mittens to keep him from yanking it out.