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