Over 7 pounds!

This is Julie, one of the Neonatal community nurses, weighing Olivia. Olivia's doing so well that they decided it was time to discharge her from thier care! You heard right- Olivia was weighed today and came in at 7 pounds 3 ounces, or 3.26 kilos! I know if you've been reading this blog you have heard stories of massive weight gain, but this is 50 grams a day, which is great. When plotted on the 'centiles', the curves which show expected weight gain and such, her weight gain is far more than expected. She started out just below the 50th 'centile' and is now well above it!

With the discharge from the Neonatal community team, Olivia's now on the 'normal' baby track- so she's really gotten to the point that the NHS feels she's in great shape! The only lingering thing from her prematurity is that we stilll have to give her extra vitamins every day until she's 12 months old. This is a pretty difficult thing to do, since they can't just be mixed with her milk... Up to now we've been using an oral feeding syringe to try to give them to her, but that's been hard. We're going to try to give her some Expressed Breast Milk from a bottle and mix the vitamins with that. If she'll accept a bottle from me, then Suzanne might be able to go off for a couple of hours while I look after Olivia- I guess some babies have no trouble with it, but others, once established with breastfeeding (which I think we can safely say Olivia is), won't take a bottle. We'll see!