It was a nice day today

Little Miss Clare (what the nurses in the ICN call her) is certainly sleepy right now. Her evening nurse Asha explained that when a baby's bilirubin is high, they tire out easily and sleep a lot (and Clare is pretty orange still). Since Clare just went on feeds as of last Wednesday, it will take her a while to process those dead red blood cells (the bilirubin). Fortunately, she is now doing that regularly, as she did that in three diaper changes today, and she will begin to be more awake for longer, and take to feeding better. Right now, she can't even come close to staying awake through a feeding, and most of what she eats (now 30 ml--she started at 6 ml last Wednesday) gets feed to her through a gavage tube, although it isn't for want of trying--we try to bottle feed her every time, get a few good pulls off of it, and then she loses interest and goes to sleep. When she does start to stay awake for her feedings, she will be all the closer to coming home from TG. She'll have to maintain her body temp better too, and she still struggles with that a bit. We have her in a onesie, a sleeper, swaddled in those awesome flannel blankets, and covered with a fleece blanket just to keep her a little under a normal temp of 37 degrees C, and that's with her isolette at 26.5 degrees C. She won't be able to go to an open air cradle until she can maintain 37 degrees with her isolette at 26.0 C. The staff tried to lower her on Friday to that, but by Saturday, she had a temp of 36.4, 36.3, and 35.8 consecutively taken @ 2 PM. We were sufficiently freaked, as one might imagine.
She's making, dare I say for sounding cliche, baby steps, but she's getting closer to coming home. Various nurses have warned us to make sure we get a car seat and get her room ready, but I think we know that it's going to be a little while.
Have you seen how many car seats there are out there? My goodness! You could pretty much spend to the sky's limit on one and for what? Six months? Of course, with a preemie, we might be using ours well into January until she starts to make headway on the gap between her gestational and real age.