Monday morning catch-up

Well, there's a good reason I haven't updated in several days- Friday evening, the stomach bug claimed PopPop... and knocked him fully out of commission. Just mere hours later, Mimi was in the same boat, and really hit hard. I managed to fend for myself and the two girls through the night (thank goodness it was overnight and the babies slept through the time that would have been most difficult to manage them!) and tried to be low-maintenance all day Saturday. Thankfully, by Sunday, they were both up and moving around and eating a bit, although Mimi is still not quite fully recovered and gets worn out easily still. Hopefully another quiet day will help, but it's hard for anyone to get much rest during the day with these two little ones to take care of! :)

Emma Kate is doing great and is getting harder and harder to keep up with- especially when she has her toooobs hooked up. Luckily she gets hooked up later in the day now (around 3:30pm) so we only have several hours to manage them before she goes to bed anyway. But it really does make it difficult to do anything other than follow her around- it's not like she wants to just stand by your side while you prepare some food for her or get a drink or anything... She's been a little clumsy lately and seems to be hitting her poor head on everything from the floor to the wall to the table in the kitchen! Don't know if she's still just getting her bearings or what, but that poor little noggin has taken a beating. Both little girls have had some snots for the last several days or so- not constantly running, but goopy sneezes mostly. It certainly hasn't slowed Emma Kate down, but hopefully it will not hinder our scoping scheduled for Wednesday morning- we're hoping that is going to provide our ticket out of here!!! We don't want to delay it! We're all having a little bit of upper respiratory irritation this morning, probably the same thing the girls have been dealing with. Just one more sickness before we leave...

We're still working out details of going home on TPN/lipids. I'm hoping to talk to the GI department today and see if we can knock her calories back again, since we've sort of stalled out on her appetite again. It would be great to have a bigger window too, how nice it would be to only have her hooked up for a couple hours before bed and overnight... She still has issues with swallowing liquids (even the honey thickened water makes her choke still, so we have to make it extra thick) but she seems to be doing well with purred foods pretty consistently. She even ate 1/2 of a cheddar cracker with peanut butter the other day- that was momentous! But yet she seems to choke on oatmeal... doesn't make a lot of sense. It's been very frustrating to find high calorie healthy foods to get in her- she will only take 1-2 ounces max in a sitting, and sometimes that's a bit of a struggle even. Most baby foods are 40-70 calories in about a 3-4oz serving, so you see my dilemma, right?? I'm still working on her calorie counts for the last week to see how she's doing- looks like we are at about 300-350cal/day on a really good day right now. It's all a bit of a guess though... I mean really, what is the caloric content of 5 cheerios anyway??? Or one slice of banana??? And she really just wants to drink 0-calorie water instead of the 355calorie/8oz Boost drink we have for her. Argh.