Happy 2 months, Bonnie!

Today is Bonnie's 2 month birthday.  Happy birthday, little one!  She celebrated by ditching her last remaining IV access.  She's had that line in her head for what seems like forever, so it's awesome to now see  her sweet little head in its entirety.  She wasn't so sure about having it taken out at first, because it involved the removal of a bunch of tape that was stuck to her head (i.e. her hair).

Still mad, but look! The left side of her head!

The reason her IV is out is because she is all done with her IV medications, most notably her fentanyl and versed, which she has been working on weaning off of for *weeks*.  She is now on scheduled doses of morphine and ativan (which are in the same families as fenanyl and versed, respectively) and will then be weaned off of those.  The ativan seems to make her really sleepy, so we've been mostly hanging out with a zonked baby for the past couple days.  We did get some cute awake time this afternoon right as we were leaving. Behold!

If you'd like something specific to pray for with Bonnie, it would be that she catch on with learning to eat.  She had a swallow study yesterday which showed she has trouble protecting her airway when swallowing thin liquids (such as breast milk).  The plan is to work on feeding her with thickened milk (they'll use rice cereal to thicken it).  Today she was so sleepy from her new meds that they couldn't even attempt to get her to bottle feed.  The NICU pharmacist (who I love because she's brilliant and also super nice) is working on scheduling her medications so that there's a good window of awake-ness that the speech therapists can use to practice feeding.

Also, there's a new baby in the NICU that just got put on ECMO yesterday.  I talked with her mom a little bit today and she's understandably terrified.  Please keep this sweet little girl and her parents in your prayers.