Lauren and Jacob's Hospital Adventure

We're still at the hospital today, but things are going great. Lauren had a mild case of pre-eclampsia heading into labor, and because her blood pressure was running a bit high, they put her on Magnesium Sulfate, which had the dual effect of preventing Lauren from being ambulatory until about 3pm Monday and creating blood sugar issues with Jacob. Lauren, once off the drug, was moved up to a recovery room, and has now been released from the hospital. She's still pretty sore and tired, but all in all, is in good shape and great spirits. Yay Lauren!!!

Jacob was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at Monday morning, a few hours after he was born. While he's basically doing fine, he has had two main problems. First, because of the Magnesium Sulfate, his blood sugar levels are low. He's been on an IV since then, and we were hoping that he would be able to go home tomorrow morning. This is still possible, but his blood sugar results are still lower than the doctors would like, so it could be later.

His second problem was that he was having problems swallowing and keeping down food. Initially, we thought this was related to the magnesium thing, but it turns out he had a bunch of uterine fluid in his stomach. Once they got rid of that, he's been eating just fine (though, like his father, he is kind of lazy and likes to drink from bottles... turns out its easier for babies to drink from bottles, and rather than put in the work on Mommy's breast, he just fusses until we give him a bottle...).

It's been hard having him in the NICU, because we can't have him in our room, we've had to make several trips to his room from Lauren's room (which is hard on Lauren), and, just at a basic level, it sucks having to pick up your son when he has all kinds of cords and monitors attached to him. He's not in any immediate danger, and he'll surely be healthy enough to come home soon. We are looking forward to that, when we can hug him and kiss him and cuddle with him and generally smother him with love.

We have a few more pictures up online. Some people seemed to have problems seeing the pictures - if all goes as planned here, you should be able to see the slideshow right below. Click on the pics to go to the individual pictures.

Enjoy!