First family visitor, 3 weeks old, and OFF THE TUBE!!!

Kathy Coit, Olivia's first cousin twice removed, sits with Olivia nd Suzanne on a short visit from France- it was great to catch up! She was one of several visitors we had at the house today.

But there's some incredible news. The second of the visitors was Jeanette, from the Community Neonatal team, to check on how Olivia was doing. They weighed her, and she is now a massive 4 pounds 14 ounces, over a pound above her birth weight. Once again, Jeanette said "whatever it is you're doing, keep doing it!". We showed her our logbook of how Olivia's been feeding the last couple of days, which has been almost 100% breastfeeding, with only a few milliliters down the tube. She decided it might be time to remove the tube, and did! It's still possible that when Jeanette visits again Olivia won't have put on enough weight through breastfeeding alone and will need the tube again, but we're very hopeful that it won't be needed again.

This is a huge step forward for us all, as well as a great reduction in the complexity of taking care of Olivia. It's a bit challenging, since if she doesn't feed well we don't have the "safety net" of the tube, but the reality is now that if she wasn't getting what she needed it would be evident over a matter of days, not minutes or hours, and so there would be time to have a new tube put in if it were _really_ needed.

We also had the "Health Visitor" stop by today and sort of gave us a briefing on what she does. And what she does is look after kids health from birth to age 16, working with the parents, the General Practitioner, and any specialists to keep kids healthy. This seems like yet another cool thing the NHS does- 0unce of prevention and all that.


Anyway, we missed the 3-week picture of Olivia by 2 days, but here it is. Perhaps obviously this was taken before the tube was taken out; we'll get a good picture of her sans tube for next time!