Recreating a womb

It's hard to remember sometimes that Linden isn't really supposed to be outside the womb just yet. Even though she's wearing clothes, eating, breathing, and looking cute, the reality is she's 34 weeks old and has a lot of development left to do.

One of Grandma Miller's current favorite pics

Reading this blog, it may seem that we are visiting with her a lot, and we are. But much of the time we are sitting rather quietly in her room with lights low. The goal is to recreate a womb-like experience for her while she continues to grow and develop. When she wakes, we talk to her and let her know we're there, or we change her diaper and take her temperature. We try to be hands on when it's appropriate and hands off when we need to be.

It's a tough balance at times. When a baby arrives, the instinct is to make her part of your family. But as a preemie, we need to try to do that in different ways. The nurses point out that Linden can recognize our smell and voices (especially Laine), so that just being in the room is helpful. They also point out that Linden needs to sleep, eat and grow and that any distraction from these needs to be merited.

Another favorite of LB restin' up

Having recently trained for an Ironman, I was amazed by how in tune with my body I was. Specifically, how seemingly small things could affect me physically. When I was running the marathon, I'd find that my mood would be directly linked to how recently I took in calories. When I finished the race, I felt fine for a couple hours. Then my body told me that I was dehydrated by causing me to lose my dinner. I would need a bag of IV fluid to recover.

Looking at Linden, I realize just how important every calorie is. In deciding when or how often to start bottle feedings, they're calculating whether they think Linden will be able to take in more calories than she'll burn from the effort her feeding requires. She expends calories regulating her temperature, breathing, digesting, pooping, and just staying awake.

At this point, the nurses have to choose a couple times each day to try feeding Linden from a bottle and they base this decision on how awake she is and hope that she's ready to put in some work. They limit the feeding effort to 20 minutes because, as I mentioned, they think that after that time she will be spending more energy than she's receiving. And I will say that after feeding for twenty minutes yesterday, she was exhausted. She slept soundly for hours.

Many people ask me if we're enjoying spending time with Linden. We definitely are. But it's not the same kind of time that you would expect with a full-term baby. Instead, it's like a sneak peek into the womb at 34 weeks, so our activity during those visits takes that into account.