Notes from the hospital

We're sitting here in our boarder room (just an empty hospital room over by the NICU) and I am antsy as heck. Joe is watching The Wire on DVD (you Wire watchers are obsessed) and I'm trying to read. It's very different to be at the hospital and not be with Graham than being without him at home. Here, I know that he's only a five minute walk down the hallway, and I want to be with him badly. But I would just be sitting there watching him sleep, and I need to sleep myself, and he needs his sleep to not be interrupted by his crazy mom.

I'm also antsy because I think things are starting to move really quickly towards Graham coming home. Joe wants us not to get our hopes up, and to keep the details of any timeline to ourselves so as not to get everyone else's hopes up, but what is a blog for if not for sharing? Graham has been doing amazingly well eating-wise, and has taken all of his bottles yesterday and today...which means that if he takes the whole bottle at 4 am, he gets his feeding tube pulled. Which means then they watch him for a few days and make sure that he is still taking all his bottles and breastfeeding well, and that he is still gaining weight, and if all that is good, he gets to go home. Aaack! Of course, I think telling us this stressed us out, which got transferred to Graham (not that we were trying to stress him out, obviously - but just in a vibes sort of way, if you're pickin' up what I'm puttin' down). And so he took the longest he's ever taken to start breastfeeding when I tried him at 4 pm today, and then took the longest he's ever taken to take his whole bottle for Joe at 8 pm. Oye. So Joe and I are just trying to cool it out, big time. We are also letting Graham cool out and rest up by having him just do a straight tube feed at midnight, which I guess is allowed in this whole pull-the-tube process. So now that I've gotten all this off my chest, Joe and I are going to brush our teeth, pull up our wafer-thin hospital blankets and try to snuggle into the very small hospital bed together. Alarms set for 4 am!