Holding the tiny man

Adam's had another pretty good week, though not without incident.  He's now 32 weeks and 4 days (gestational age) and will be 5 weeks old tomorrow.  He's progressed onto a slightly different sort of breathing support, which means he has to do slightly more work himself, but as a reward gets to only have a nasal cannula rather than a mask that squishes his face.  He seems to be relishing the challenge and is coping fine with it so far. He's grown about a hundred grams in the past week and is now around 970g.  Though that's a fairly impressive growth of over 10% of his body weight in a week, it is slower than he should be growing.  Another mum, who's a doyenne of the neonatal unit, told us that her baby took 6 weeks to reach 1 kg in weight but after that gained 1.5 kg in a month, as they can start fortifying breastmilk when they are big enough to cope with the thicker consistency.  She's great  - she always seems to be smiling and reassuring someone, though I've now chatted to her on a number of occasions but have no idea what her name is.  Anyway, hopefully it all means we will be able to get Adam to grow a bit more soon.  He's now on "full feeds", getting all his nutrition from milk, rather than intravenously, which might help and at least means he's in the position to get fortified milk when he's big enough to have it.

As the title of this entry suggests, though, the big news from this week has been our first "cuddles" with Adam, photos of which follow.  I was first, on Wednesday, and had a really lovely time. The nurses very carefully extracted him from the incubator and told me exactly how to hold him and what was happening.  Though Adam was a bit stressed at the very beginning, he calmed down quickly, and we had about an hour and a half sitting together, skin to skin (you wear a hospital gown and they place him upright on your chest), so we could smell each other and feel each other's movements.  He has a surprising amount of strength in his wriggles for such a small person, but didn't do too much of that, and I stopped worrying about him fairly quickly, after seeing that his oxygen levels were pretty stable (and also being helped by my lovely friend turning up for a nice chat!).  Eventually I had to give him back to the box, but I felt so much closer to him afterwards and I hope he felt the same!

After this, it was Chris' turn on Saturday, and while I was expressing in the breast pump room, he got kitted up for his first close father-son bonding session.  Sadly, it wasn't to work out so well.  When Adam was placed on Chris' chest he got very stressed and his oxygen saturations dropped dramatically.  Then, when he was given a feed he got more perturbed and started spluttering.  His oxygen saturations dropped more, his heart rate slowed and he changed colour.  He was returned to the incubator but the nurse ended up pulling the emergency buzzer and Adam was given resuscitation from the emergency oxygen mask.  He recovered and was fine a few minutes later, but obviously this scared Chris a lot, and left us both unsure about whether we wanted to do skin-to-skin, or kangaroo care, again while Adam is so small.  It's important to say that while it is lovely to be able to feel close to our son, we are big grown ups (just about) and could cope with not cuddling him if it was a bad thing for his health!  The reason it is such a good thing to do, is because it has been shown that skin-to-skin contact is very beneficial for the baby too, helping them develop better regulation of their heart rate, breathing and temperature regulation.  Obviously the increased parent-child bonding is important too!  Given all this, after he had adjusted well to his new breathing support, and having ascertained that he was having a good day and that the nurse was supportive, we gave it another go today.  I had him first, for about an hour and a half, during which, thankfully, though he was a little unsettled at first he was then pretty calm.  Chris then took over, and kept him there for another hour and a half, during which time Adam was really stable.  So it's been a good day.  We both got a good bit of tiny baby love, and little Adam got three whole hours of big smelly parent love.  We will definitely be trying this all again soon, though we will definitely choose our moments carefully and it'll be a long while before I'll be able to avoid constantly checking his oxygen levels on the monitors.  Anyway check out our tiny bundle of baby below, scaled next to his ginormous parents!