Our little girl is six weeks old today. . .which is really hard to believe!  Things are going so well and we are finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Unfortunately though, we don’t know how far away that light might be.

She is steadily gaining weight – currently weighing in at 3 lbs, 5 oz – and the doctors want her to be gaining between 1/2 an ounce to an ounce per day.  She is still under the oxygen hood, but she doesn’t really need it. . .she just likes it!  She is receiving 21% oxygen, which is room air.  However, she likes the humidity she receives from the hood (we believe), so when they try to take it off, she drops her oxygen saturation and they have to replace it.  There really isn’t a way to ween her off of that, she just has to decide she is done with it.

She is up to four bottles per day now, one every other feeding.  She normally takes the entire bottle, which is now 32 ml – just over an ounce.  She is developing the pattern of waking before it’s time to eat to let them know she is hungry.  We should be at 8 bottles in no time!

And that’s pretty much the only things that we are waiting on now.  She has to get off of the oxygen hood and take her bottles.  Of course, she has to gain the weight, but there’s not really a set amount there, that will come.

As for me – I had my 6 week appointment last week and we got some information.  They did blood work and tests on my placenta and found the cause of the problems.  There was apparently a rather large blood clot there taking up about half of the placenta.  We had done tests early on to check for this and they all came back negative.

We began seeing a change in her size at around 8 weeks, with the big difference hitting around 18 weeks.  However, that means that she was fighting for nutrition very early on and continued doing so up until she was born.  The doctor said that he was surprised that I didn’t miscarry early on in the pregnancy.  I said she was just meant to be!

The good news here is that we have identified the problem and it can be (possibly) treated, if ever we decide to have another child.  It also means that this was the cause of the preeclampsia, so by treating the clotting issue, we will be lowering the chances of that returning.

So, good news there!