Introducing Sloan Yates Loudis

Baby Girl "BG" Loudis (formerly known as Warby) came into this world on Wednesday, August 15th at 10:04am, and weighed in at 3lbs, 1oz. She surprised her parents with her early arrival, but she apparently had somewhere to be - and quick! The rumor is that she wanted to make sure she didn't miss any football games...

Snug as a bug in a rug

For a 32 week old preemie, she was surprisingly strong. She came out able to breathe on her own, and some of the NICU nurses said her sucking abilities looked more like a 34 week old baby. Apparently she is already acting older than her age...  She is a feisty little thing and is always squirming around in her incubator. Arms flailing around and legs sprawled out across her little nest of a home. There was a time when they had a nose cannula to help with oxygen, but she kept messing with it and that experiment was over.

From the beginning they inserted a feeding tube into her mouth. They started with about 5ml of food, but quickly learned it was too much so they dropped her to 4ml and established a good starting point. Her intake has increased 2 ml every 12 hours since and as of this blog posting she should be at about 20 ml per feeding. They feed her each day at 1, 4, 7 & 10 - both am & pm. The feeds take about 2 hours to go through, she digests for an hour, and then they do it all again. As of Sunday they moved the feeding tube to her nose because those flailing arms would pull it out. Mom & Dad think she looks better with the tube in her nose anyway.

Reaching for the tubes

As is the case with a lot of preemies, her bilirubin levels were high so by Friday they had her under the lights to help prevent jaundice. She got to come out briefly on Sunday & Monday, but her levels have risen again and she is back to getting a suntan. This is a fairly common problem to have and we're told levels typically subside 7-10 days after birth.

Under the lights. Note the sprawling arms & legs

The biggest medical hurdle so far have been 'bradys' (short for bradycardia). These are episodes where the heart rate drops below a certain number (100 in our case). Between weeks 32-34 is when babies develop the ability to breathe, suck and swallow at the same time. If this coordination isn't quite perfected yet, the breathing will become really shallow and the heart rate drops. Each of these episodes only lasts a few seconds and they're typically brought out of them by a little jostle or stimulation. On Friday, BG Loudis had 16 of these episodes. The doctors were really alarmed at this number so they first dropped her feed amount. The bradys continued, though not as often, so they decided to give her caffeine on Saturday evening. She ended up with 10 bradys on Saturday. By Sunday the number dropped to 4, and on Monday there was only one. Tuesday was our first brady-free day, so we have made significant progress. However, we aren't out of the woods yet - there was one brady today (Wednesday) but it only lasted a few seconds and she brought herself out of it.

Cuteness

Once she has proven she is over the bradys, she'll become what is known as a "feeder & grower". This just means that she has to get bigger and stronger. By Tuesday night she reached her birth weight again (roughly 1400 grams). The next milestone is around 1700-1800 grams. This is when she'll be big enough to start regulating her body temperature. Once she can do that, her brady spells are gone, and she is at least 1800 grams she can come home! 1800 grams is only a rough estimate though - they've done all sorts of precautionary tests to make sure nothing else is causing her size issue, but they've all come back normal. She is likely just a really small baby, so they may want her to be just a bit more than 1800 grams.

Now on to the more fun and less medical stuff. It took us until Sunday, but we finally named our sweet little Warby: Sloan Yates Loudis. You have to understand that we had a list of about 9 names when she was born. Our plan was to go to dinner for Barry's birthday (Sept 4) and narrow down our list to a Top 3, take those to the hospital with us and then decide. That obviously did not happen, so while I was in my drug-induced haze we narrowed it down to a Top 5, and by late Saturday we had a Top 2 - Greer or Sloan.  He came back to the hospital on Sunday morning, said he had slept on it, and felt like Sloan should be the winner. After doing a little research, we learned that Sloan means "warrior", and after the fight she has shown us already, how can you argue with that? It was very important to me to honor my paternal grandmother who passed away just last December, so we gave her the middle name Yates, which was MawMaw's maiden name. She is now officially Sloan Yates Loudis, but rest assured she will still answer to Warby - and Mom and Dad are definitely guilty of still calling her that every once in a while.

Our final list of names - it stared at Mom for days in the hospital bed

Finally, our current status... Mom & Dad go visit Sloan at least twice a day. Typically one of these visits will consist of "Kangaroo Care" time - basically skin on skin time for at least an hour. The first session was a huge hit on Sunday night and our little Baby Girl began to sleep much more peacefully afterwards. Mom likes to go in the mornings for the 10am feeding and sit for as long as two hours. Dad finally got to do his first session last night and thought it was pretty awesome. Sloan had the hiccups for the first ten minutes or so, then spent the second ten minutes squirming around on his chest trying to find a nipple - we finally gave her a binky and she settled down quickly. Each night when we go back, whether we are kangaroo'ing or just saying Good Night, we are reading her a book. The first night was "On the Night You Were Born", then it was "Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?" and finally "The Going To Bed Book". Tonight's selection is "Does A Kangaroo Have A Mother, Too?".

Mom and Kangaroo Time 

Dad and Kangaroo Time