I Never Thought This Day Would Come

My baby is taking a bottle!!! I somehow never thought this day would come. She has slowly been warming up to the special sippy cup I have for her. Each day she was making more progress and drinking little by little from the sippy cup. Two nights ago I went to fill up her milk bag for her feeding tube and she started opening her mouth, basically rooting around for something to drink. I had the bottle of milk in my hand and thought, what the heck, I will see if she will take a regular bottle instead of the special sippy cup I had been giving her. And whoila!! She started sucking and drank for a couple of minutes!! Then the next morning she pulled her feeding tube out and we decided to give her a day without the tube and try just the bottle. She did pretty good. For about a 12 hour period she drank 6 ounces which is an absolute miracle for her!! However, it was about half the ounces she should have taken in for that period of time. Bummer. So we put the tube back in (which we knew we would have to do). She took the bottle again a few times today but did not drink as much. Here's the problem though, she drinks in 5 minutes what her system is used to digesting in about 40 minutes. Therefore, she throws it all up!! My poor little baby, she finally tries to drink a bottle and then her little tummy can't handle it and up it goes! I talked to the dietician at the GI clinic and she told me to maybe not give her the bottle very much because she is not keeping it down. It is pretty hard to not want to really help Gracie along at this point. We have waited almost 10 months for her to really drink a bottle and she is finally doing it. Yea Gracie Girl!! But for now, the main thing is to get her to thrive and gain weight for her surgery. So I will continue to try a little bit of bottle feeding every day until we can really concentrate on it after her surgery. I asked the dietician how long you should keep a baby on an NG tube and she said usually only 6 months. So I think that after her heart surgery we will most likely be looking at a g-tube with the Nissin. Unless another miracle happens and she miraculously stops throwing up, we'll see.

Gracie has been a little whiny lately and I think it is because she is cutting more teeth!! I noticed a MOLAR on her right bottom side today. She now has three almost four top teeth and four bottom teeth with that molar. My babies usually have 12 teeth by the time they are ONE so she is on her way!!