Slowly improving still = improving

Today was a great Easter, our first with our little guy as part of our family! It was very different from our last Easter (ask us how it felt to hunt for Easter eggs in Las Vegas...) and the one before that (a more normal Easter, spent with our families). We managed to get to Easter church at Harvest, which really reminded us how thankful we are to have a church home that we love. Following church, we headed home to eat the meal my mom was kind enough to bring ( I NEVER would have gotten pork chops, cranberry sauce and cardamom shortbread together in time for a holiday meal;)), and then went right over to be with Dane.

Yesterday, he was pretty wiped out, but today, his nurse again attempted to bottle feed him and was successful, with him eating almost 30 ml. With his milk feeds increasing each time, he finally broke the 4 pound barrier, weighing in at a whopping 4.1 lbs! Yay Dane! We tried to do some more breast feeding, and while he was able to latch a couple times, he was too tired to put the effort into sucking more than a few times. We'll keep working on it until both he and Mom get the hang of it! The nurses have said that he's still young/little enough that they're not concerned at all and will just keep practicing to help him get the hang of it once he's a bit bigger.

We're still waiting for another echocardiogram to give us an updated view of his PDA, but as his doctors have said, we're just ignoring it for now. There's a pretty good chance that it could still close completely on it's own, which would be a big answer to prayer. I can't imagine how nervous I'll be if he ends up having to have surgery.

The good news is that he's doing so well that he'll get his PICC line out tonight, finally allowing him to have two hands free of wires and boards - two hands to give the "I am DANE!" salute:) We also got a call from the NICU tonight letting us know that because he's so stable, his doctor decided he'd be a good candidate to move to an ancillary NICU on another floor, being used because of the construction currently going on in the main NICU. While I'm slightly nervous about his move away from his current, very safe environment, it's encouraging to us that they think he's well enough to move, even within the hospital; it gives me hope that he'll be home soon.

Just for fun, here are another couple fun facial expressions that we love to see, even if they really only mean he's pooping:)