October in 2006 and 2007

I don't really have any new pictures to post, so I thought I would pull some from the past.

This one was taken October 16, 2006 when Austin was less than a month old. He is not wearing clothes in this picture because he was still in an isolette (incubator) which regulated his body temperature for him. Hence, no need for clothes. He actually started wearing clothes a little bit after this picture was taken when they transferred him to a regular baby bed.

A little commentary might be in order for some of you, so I'll explain what all the tubes and things are. He has an oxygen tube and a feeding tube in his nose. He was tube fed at least part of the time until he came home from the hospital. He didn't even start eating by mouth until he was about a month old. At 29 weeks gestation, he just wasn't born with the ability to breathe, suck and swallow all at the same time. He has stickies on his chest to monitor his vital signs, and he has a pulseoximeter on his wrist to monitor his blood oxygen levels. If his oxygen levels dropped, the nurses sometimes had to increase the amount of oxygen they gave him. And finally, he has a hat and a warm blanket on while we were holding him in order to keep his body temperature up. He also had something on his body that measured his temperature, so we knew when he was getting too cold. As I remember, we usually kept him pretty warm when we were holding him. Those were precious moments because we were only able to hold him once or twice a day for a short time (less than an hour or so).


And this is a picture from October, 2007. See how much he grew in a year's time, and he has grown even more this past year as well.