Our Johnny is 3 weeks old! He is approaching the big 5 pounds, weighing in at 4 pounds, 13 ounces. He is currently trying to learn how to eat with practice sessions twice a day. Like training for a marathon with no running experience, you start off slow and build up. Over the past week, we saw a gradual increase in the amount he could eat at each meal. He went from 12 cc’s last week to his complete feeding today of 54 cc’s! It was a great surprise that he completed his entire bottle, not once, but twice! The goal for the coming weeks will be to increase the frequency of his meals by mouth and still gain weight. They want to make sure he doesn’t exhaust all of his calories on eating! Once he masters the bottle concept, he is yet another step closer to coming home 🙂

In other news, the doctor’s noticed that Johnny’s heart rate tends to be high. Due to the episodes of drifting with shallow breathing, he was on caffeine for the first couple weeks. His heart rate was high, but that could have been a side effect of the caffeine. Now that his episodes are less frequent with maybe one or two a day, the doctors stopped the caffeine. However, his heart rate fluctuates, jumping to the 200’s beats per minute, then back to normal. Last week, he had an EKG and an echocardiogram. Both tests were normal. He is having a third test right now with a Halter Monitor, basically a 24 hour heart monitor. The CHOP cardiologist will review these three test to determine if there is a cause for his increased heart rate and if there is a follow up plan. Overall, he looks great and if he wasn’t in the NICU with a heart rate monitor hooked up to him, we wouldn’t even know that his rate tends to have periods where it is high. Until we hear otherwise, we are trying not to worry and continue to take one day at a time.