Jake and Abby: Three Weeks Old

Everyone is doing great and getting bigger! Jake and Abby will be 35 weeks gestational age tomorrow, which seems a long way from the 31 weeks, 3 days when they were born.

Jake and Abby are both in open cribs now! This means that they are both able to hold their own body temperature, so no more isolettes, the plastic boxes where they spent their first few weeks staying warm. This is exciting for a few reasons - first, because it's one of the requirements that they need to meet to come home. Second, it makes them seem a little more like "nursery babies" which is fun for us. And finally, now we can walk in and scoop them up whenever we want - no need to ask a nurse to help us hold them! (Don't worry, they have "don't steal me" bracelets on that alarm in case anyone else tries to scoop them up but us.)
Jake is now 5.3 pounds - preemie clothes are VERY snug! - and Abby is a whopping 4.1 pounds! Although I'm sure it won't last forever, right now every ounce is exciting to us and something to celebrate.
Abby is back up to her full feeds and also started on the same vitamins that Jake has been on for the past few days, so hopefully she'll start gaining as fast as he has been lately. The nurses say that neither baby is a "puker", and apparently they can usually predict this at this age, so we are hoping this stays the case when they come home with us.
Bottle feeding is...okay it's not really getting easier for them, but come on, they're still really young. Everyone tells us that they'll get it when they get it, and when they do it will be like a light switch. Until then, we're having a good time working with them on it...and Aunt Angela got to feed Abby this week too!

Nothing else really to report which is great. At this point, we're waiting for them to figure out the whole eating thing, and then they need to be able to go 5 days with no A's or B's before they can come home. It could be as early as next week, or as late as their due date in early October, and there is no one that can guess when it will happen and nothing that will tell us that they're ready until they're actually ready. This is my test to see who is reading the blog, because we get asked EVERY day if we know when they are coming home! We won't know the answer to that until we have one foot out the door at the NICU. And believe me, once we get one foot out the door we are going to RACE home and very happily say goodbye to the hospital for what will hopefully be a very, very long time!

As promised, photos from the last few weeks...

Jake's first bottle! (Bad mom already, was so busy feeding Jake that I didn't get pictures of Jeff giving Abby her first bottle on 8/22 or her "I had my first bottle" sign. Shhh don't tell her!)