Today is Brady’s 87th day at Memorial. It’s been a long 86 days and it seems we may be coming to the end of it. Nearly the past month has actually not been spent in the NICU. Brady has been in a step-down area (a good step down) call the ISN (intermediate special-care nursery). Lately the big focal point has been Brady’s feeding. She simply isn’t taking as many bottles as she should be at this age. We’ve discussed the possibility of a G-tube with a number of nurses and a couple of doctors. It looks like either one of two things will happen. 1: Brady will pick up on her feeding and start taking all 8 bottles in a day consistently or 2: she will have a G-tube put in to assist with the feeding until she’s able to do it all on her own. In both of these cases she would be coming home very soon.

Obviously the (majority of the) nurses and doctors don’t want to put Brady through surgery that isn’t really necessary so she’s been given the weekend to really show if she can do the bottle thing on her own or not. Her formula has been changed to try and help also. On Thursday night she had a scare when she stopped breathing and from what I understand it took some significant stimulation to get her back on track. She’d also spit up that night worse than ever. These things combined got our little girl kicked from the ISN back into the NICN. They wanted to really be able to keep a close eye on her if she was going to start having apnea issues.

Due to these night time scares the docs wanted to do a couple of things with Brady. First they wanted to do an upper GI to check and make sure her insides looked okay and normal (which they did) and second they want to do an MRI of her head. The upper GI happened yesterday around 4:30 and the MRI will be happening sometime today. These are precautionary actions to make sure every angle is covered. The MRI is to make sure she doesn’t appear to have anything developmentally wrong with her brain. Needless to say it’s been a long 24 hours.

Video Slideshow

This coming Thursday will mark her 3 month birthday and boy has she changed! When she first came into this world she looked like a little 1lb 7oz miniature wrinkly old man. Now she’s a chunky little girl who is already spoiled by family other than mommy and daddy. We’ve had a couple of nurses say she’s “probably the best dressed baby in the NICU” and mommy is very proud of that statement. Daddy isn’t as impressed. :)

In these 86 days we have take nearly 1000 photos and some of them are actually pretty good. There were days when we didn’t have our camera but just had to get a shot of her so we used the phone camera(s). I made a slideshow of photos from day 1 to day 85 so you can really see how our little girl has changed. The video is about 3 1/2 minutes and the music is from an excellent CD that we would suggest to anyone with a baby called Dream a Little. It’s from a series of CDs called The Little Series and the song in the video is “All Through the Night”.