4:30am

Saturday, 4:30am. It's already getting light out and I just heard a bird chirping outside. Why are we awake? Just a joy of parenting... Hopefully someday we'll be able to once again 1) sleep a full night straight and 2) sleep in on a Saturday morning. It's already been almost a week without sleeping more than 3 hours in any single stretch...that's rough. Even during my hardest med school months I'd still get a somewhat decent night's sleep two out of every three nights...

Dane has been very grumpy tonight. He hadn't pooped since Wednesday morning (almost 3 full days ago!), which is long enough to make anyone unhappy. We haven't gotten a lot of sleep. We are currently fortifying his bottle-feeds of breast milk with some formula to bring breast milk (20 calories per ounce) up to 22 calories per ounce. For a while in the NICU he was getting 24 calories per ounce but they reduced the fortification to make him more hungry and to take more fluids. We think that he might benefit from more than 22cal/ounce right now and might fortify a little more for a day or two. He seems to be hungry but unable to tolerate more volume of milk because once he takes the full 60mL (every 4 hours), he has been spitting up some of it even when we keep him upright for 20 minutes and burp him well. My theory is that his stomach didn't have a lot of space due to all of the poop in his system. (Like his parents, Dane is occasionally full of crap! Hahahaha.) So if we increase the calories/ounce, he won't need to eat as much volume in order to achieve the same caloric intake, hopefully meaning decreased spitting up.

Anyway, I said that Dane hadn't pooped since Wednesday. Tonight it turns out that the big reason he was ornery, at least at his 4:30am wake-up, was because there was poop on the way. I'd heard the horror stories of poop shooting up all the way up the baby's back so the waistband on Dane's diaper was very snug. What I hadn't thought about was that, after he fills the diaper like a balloon, the poo still has to go somewhere. In this case, it couldn't go up his back so it shot out the leg holes in an explosion all the way to both knees. Not pretty. Larissa and I had to change that diaper as a team...not enough wipes have ever been made to clean that mess. And thank goodness that we have bought a Diaper Genie, a contraption that holds up to 180 diapers in an air-tight (read that "smell-proof") bag until it is full and we can throw them all out at once...

OK, almost enough news for today. Other than being hungry and occasionally ornery and continuing to get a bit backed up with poop, Dane is doing really well. He is able to lift his head up (off the floor during tummy-time or off my chest when I'm burping him), which is exciting. When he does lift his head up, he is far from stable - we watch his head wobble from side to side before usually crashing in a face-plant back into the damp burp rag. We are just hoping that now that's he is fed and pooped he will sleep for a solid 3 to 4 hours so that we can get some uninterrupted sleep. Life right now revolves around sleep, bottles, and diapers - life isn't exactly exciting but it is still such a blessing to have Dane home and in our lives. He's worth all of the sleepless nights and dirty diapers (or at least we hope we'll feel that way looking back on it!)