Dad gets a cuddle too

Ok, now that I've put up the original announcement, I can update you all on how things have been going since then. It's only been a few days, but things seem to change all the time. For a start, here's a picture of Dad and Olivia, when she was just 24 hours old. By this time she'd gotten out of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and into the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU).

Two big steps there were that she no longer needed CPAP (not sure what it actually stands for but some of the letters are positive and pressure), which helped her breathe a bit- not a ventillator, the way I'd describe it is if you had air blowing out of a straw at a little bit of pressure, and the straw was up your nose. This just gave her little lungs the little bit of extra pressure to help her inflate them. She was still doing all the breathing on her own, but it looked a bit odd, with air hoses strapped to her forehead and a little cannula up her nose. The other great thing about moving to SCBU was that she no longer needed an incubator, but rather was put on a "hot cot" which is kind of like a heated waterbed, with lots of blankets piled ontop to keep her warm. No longer needing the incubator was great because it meant she was out in the open, and we no longer needed to reach in through little holes in the incubator to touch her, and perhaps obviously we could give her a little cuddle! Another big step was removing one of the monitors- it had little electrodes on her chest to monitor her heartbeat, now there's just a single wire that goes to a little LED that shines light through her foot, in the process determining her pulse and oxygen saturation (she's usually at 100%!).