Happy Due Day!

Today is the original due date (40 weeks gestation) for our babies. December 27. Eliza is now 110 days old, or zero days adjusted age. She weighs just shy of 3 and a half pounds today. It's a bittersweet day since we're happy that Eliza is here and doing as well as she is, but this milestone makes us especially miss Oliver and Charlotte and wonder what they would be like at this age.

The latest change in Eliza's plan seems to be working well for her. Previously, because she was not growing again, and kept dumping her food undigested out of her ostomy, they kept decreasing her food and increasing her TPN (intravenous) nutrition to give her more guaranteed calories and nutrients (since the TPN doesn't need to be digested and can't be dumped). But restricting her food intake so much was making her hungry and fussy, so she was burning extra calories by fussing, not the desired outcome!

On Christmas Day, one of our favorite nurse practitioners came up with a clever new approach - increase Eliza's TPN to where it provides all of her caloric and nutritional needs, and instead of giving her any fixed amount of food on a fixed schedule, just let her eat when she acts hungry, with food that gets successfully digested instead of dumped being a bonus rather than a part of her base nutritional requirements.

So far this new plan seems to be working really well. She's eating about every three hours, eating a LOT (nearly as much as she was being given before), acting content and sleeping a lot, and gaining weight fast. We hope it continues!