The Beginning of Recovery...

Maia is 9 days old today... she's recovering nicely, improving slowly but surely in "baby steps" with no major setbacks (knock on wood). Her swelling has gone down a lot since surgery and with the help of some diuretics, she is peeing more regularly now. She still has tubes everywhere around her but her feet are tube-free for now. She still has her breathing tube, which we all know she hates, because she's once again trying to get her arms and hands in position to grab it! Since she has a breathing tube, she cannot cry... so the nurses rely on her facial expressions and overall fussiness to determine her comfort level, and adjust her pain meds when necessary. Yesterday, every time she looked at daddy's face, she seemed to cry! I was kind of funny... she'd look around and when her eyes settled and focused on Gordon's face, she made her cry face! I call it her silent cry. They said her voice will be hoarse and raspy when her breathing tube is removed, so her cry will somewhat sound the same... I kind of like this silent cry though! 

Her swelling has gone down and the doctors are waiting for her to shrink and pee a little bit more before closing her chest. So we're hoping that will happen sometime soon, maybe this weekend, so that they can start to wean her off some heart meds... which means less tubes! I also can't wait to have her breathing tube removed so that we can all see her cute little face again! I cannot get used to this tape beard look... not cute at all! Plus her lips get chapped and constantly needs "lipgloss" aka Aquaphor!

Overall she is doing great, just like we expected. I think back and find it hard to believe that she had open heart surgery at only 4 days old! She's expected to be in the hospital for at least another 3-4 weeks, if all goes well with no major complications... so that's what we're hoping for! Sometimes I want to spend more time at the hospital, but there are times her reaction to us is really strong, causing her heart rate to increase... so that's not always a good thing! The more rest she gets the better. So we stay for a few hours, get updates from the nurses and doctors, then leave to continue life outside the hospital. 

Right now, both Gordon and I are slowly catching up on sleep, little by little. I don't think we expected driving back and forth to be so tiring, but at the end of the day, it's worth it. We try to balance our time between home and the hospital, including spending time with Marcus. We actually had a parent-teacher conference with Marcus' kindergarten teacher and he's doing very well so far. His teacher, Mrs. Huie, admired our common sense approach to parenting and suggested we teach some other parents! Gordon says he's going to write a parenting book someday! Ha ha... it should be funny!

For now I'll leave you with a pic of Maia, getting ready for an attempt to grab her breathing tube... I think she waits til we all leave the room!

Maia in pinky up position!

 Also... here is a little video that daddy made!