The Most Adorable Cry

I never thought a baby's cry would be one of the sweetest sounds I've ever heard, but this time it truly is! Alexander was extubated on Friday and is now on a CPAP ventilator. This ventilator goes through his nose and into the back of his throat. The vent settings are pretty high but his oxygen was pretty low all weekend until today. This is a HUGE step for him and makes it very exciting for us. Because he does not have the chest tube in, you can now hear his tiny cry. He showed us this in full force today before his 3pm feeding, which is exactly what we want - him to be hungry and show it! It was especially fun to see Andrew react to it - "Baby crying."

He still has his feeding tube in his mouth and we will not be able to starting trying to feed with a bottle or breast until he's on a less powerful ventilator that makes swallowing easier. That will be up to him to show us when he's ready. They still believe it will be a couple months before Alexander will be good and ready to come home. That's extremely difficult to hear, especially because he's starting to act more and more like a healthy baby, but I know we need to be patient so he's 100% ready.

We've also moved into a permanent room in Bay 2-3 and are now in Room 22. It's much larger than Room 6 in Bay 1 and our temp room, so it made it very comfortable to have our family there visiting today. I can hold Alexander every time we visit for as long as he will tolerate and that's especially wonderful for me to bond with my baby boy!

We were able to go to Ankeny this weekend to celebrate Papa G's birthday and see family and friends. Therefore Andrew was able to see his brother for the first time since Christmas! Andrew likes to tell us what Alex is doing - "Baby night night. Baby eat. Baby crying. My bro-der." We are lucky to have Andrew make even the smallest celebrations even better. 

Andrew enjoyed playing with Sophia, Jacob and Rachel. They shared lots of fun, silly moments! Andrew had to have a little timeout and Sophia ran up to him afterwards and said, "Andrew, please don't get any more timeouts!" It's going to be crazy fun once Jake is up, moving around and Alex joins them!