Wednesday, June 11--6pm

We are completely wiped out today.  Clare's feedings were met with varying degrees of success throughout the day.  At 11am Clare was ambitious in her efforts and she stayed awake long after we put her back in the isolette.  2pm was difficult because she wouldn't wake up--no doubt because she stayed up too late after her last feeding.  At 5pm she was still sleepy and only opened her eyes a time or two, but then got her act together and finished her bottle.  We expect to find a gavage tube in her tomorrow, since she's tiring out so easily today.  The good news is, we found a surprise in her diaper at 2pm but it wasn't a bad surprise;  it looked healthy, no traces of blood, so we're hopeful her little alimentary canal is all healed up and stronger than before.  Tomorrow she gets bumped up to 9 ccs from the 6 she's been taking today.

The feeding tacks a surprising amount of time onto her usual diaper care and temperature check.  Today we felt like we were running a relay race...over and over and over.  At 8am, 11am, 2pm, and 5pm, the baton gets passed to us and off we go to complete our leg of the course.  It seems we barely had time to clear our heads after the last care cycle and feeding, and here it was, time to start all over again.  No wonder Clare is tired.  Can she get any quality sleep when we keep bugging her all the time?  This worries me a bit.  Forget kangarooing today--we were overstimulating her as is just with the addition of bottle-feeding to her routine.  

I've gotten so used to Clare that I've forgotten how small she really is.  When I burped her, she just looked so tiny, like a small child's baby doll.  I come home and the cats look HUGE.  All of the cats weigh between three and four times Clare's birth weight.  It's like finding woolly mammoths living in the house.  Funny thing is, Clare's skull and brain are already bigger than the cats', which makes them look all the more absurd.

So all this anxiety over her first oral feeds has left us emotionally and physically spent.  I think that Clare's not the only one overstimulated today.