Nate's Journey: Snippets from Lola's first week of life (Auckland Hospital)

Lola's second day on Earth, was almost as surreal as her first. I awoke early for feeding (ah the joys of three hourly feeding!), but also just to stare at our wee girl and marvel at the sheer existence of her! Plus to take many more of what must be a zillion photos so far :-). She is very photogenic! Here are just a snippet of her early hours/days......

Like 5am on Day Two! 26hours old....

And more later that day.....

Robin came back into visit with Nate. Sadly Ruby was nursing a cold, so had to stay away. Our little man was pretty excited - to see us and have photos, but also to charge around the hospital corridors with Daddy....

My two precious babies!

Too cute, right? Love my BooBoo!

I had asked Robin to pick up a prem outfit, as all of our newborn clothes were just WAY too big! Here she is looking all cutesy in her only outfits that fitted.

Giving birth naturally had helped us to escape NICU, as the natural birth helps clear the lungs of mucus which makes a difference for premmies. So that was a major plus! However that didn't mean everything in the first few days went smoothly, and then again you wouldn't necessarily expect it to with a 36 weeker.

While all three of Lola's glucose tests were perfect and her first feed went really well, unfortunately her subsequent feeds weren't quite so good, which turned out to be the result of a tongue-tie. So that meant a nasal gastro tube and also trials with a few bottles to help her feed while we waited for that to be addressed.

Special moment with my wee girl

Once her tongue tie was fixed about mid-way through the week, things then improved greatly and we were able to remove the nasal gastro tube, wean off the formula, and focus on breast feeding. The delay in addressing the tongue tie and lack of feeding, also impacted my milk supply, which was a little stressful as all new mums will attest to. (Thankfully after we came home and a week or two had passed, things quickly improved with that too).

Lola also had to have three successive heel pricks to ensure her jaundice wasn't worsening. By about day three she looked quite orange, and her first couple of tests suggested this was quite high, but by about the third, she was showing improvement. Pretty stressful watching them squeeze blood out of her heel though - brought back memories of what they used to do with Nate in NICU around both his jaundice and also his low blood platelets.