Day 56 - My 3 Pumpkins!

I smuggled a little pumpkin into Joshua's room to get a picture of him with it. I bought 3 little pumpkins all 3 different sizes and took the kids pictures with "their" pumpkin. It's the closest I get this year of real pumpkin patch pictures. It'll do for this year!

Today is day 56 of Joshua's life and hospital stay, which means we have 50 days left until Christmas and Joshua's hopeful homecoming. He finally hit 11 pounds yesterday!! At 2 months Noah weighed 13 pounds 6 ounces. Both boys were born around the same weight of about 8 and a half pounds. So Joshua is still a little behind in weight, but the fact that he's gaining is great news!! The amounts he is being fed change daily. Today he was having 6 bottles by mouth each at 20ml, then 6ml per hour of continuous feed into the top portion (for each bottle the continuous feed is off for an hour, so six hours total for the day) and then 28ml per hour of continuous feed into the bottom portion which is a mix of the output from the ostomy bag (partially digested breastmilk and stomach juices) and elacare formula. All of the upper feeds are only breastmilk. Tomorrow, they may move the bottles down to 4 or 5 and move up the continuous upper amount. We'll see.

He is smiling now!! It is so cute. He just coos and makes this sweet little sighing sound when he smiles. And he gets excited and moves his arms all around. It's so sweet. Today I spent a lot of time talking to the nutrition lady about all the different feed options and she told me whenever she is discussing Joshua with surgeons, doctors or whoever, they refer to him as "big boy" because they're so used to working with little preemies and his a big normal sized baby! She said it's kind of fun to have a normal sized baby to work with. It feels so good to know that he's normal other than this little problem, that just happened by chance and will be fixed.

I like to do all sorts of things in my head that make the time seem to go by faster. For instance, saying I only have 3 more Monday's until surgery, seems shorter to me than 3 weeks. So everyday, I'm like yay, only 3 more Thursday's or whatever the day is!! I also keep tally marks on a dry erase board in his room and break them up into rows. So now we just have four more marks to finish the next row and then one more row after that until surgery. I know, it's strange. But it helps me.

The kids start Upward next week. Noah is playing basketball again and Abby is starting cheerleading. It's crazy to add more things to our schedule, but I really don't want any of my kids to miss out on something because I can't handle the schedule. Daddy and I both feel like it's important to get them involved in Upward sports, so we'll do whatever we have to do to make it work. So it's practices until early December and then the games begin and go through January. So hopefully it'll work out and everyone will be happy.

Our 9th anniversary is next week. We always go to Outback Steakhouse for our anniversary dinner. We started it on our honeymoon in Maui. Every year we go to a different location. We've been to Hawaii, Massachusetts, Texas (2 different locations), Kentucky and Ohio (3 different locations). We always take a picture during the meal and I have a scrapbook just for those pictures. It's cute to see us and the kids grow and change. I want to wait until Joshua can come with us to do the dinner. I want all of my kids in the picture. So maybe sometime in January, we'll get to go out and do it.

Well I guess that's it for now. Noah, Abby and I are watching Survivor. Then it's bedtime for them and I have to pump and go to bed myself. I'm tired! Goodnight!