Wednesday night July 19th

All is well with the boys. No reason for the late post other than Momma played hookey from work today and took a nap this afternoon. Fretting kind of caught up with me.
Griffith is doing well. He was still on the vent, though. The docs decided to give him a little more time to get over the surgery before they took the morphine away from him. The issue is that the pain meds depress his breathing. They are going to space out the morphine a little more and possibly get him off of the vent tomorrow. Frankly, I am all about the pain management -- for me and for my child. If we could get a 2 for 1 (or 3 or 4 for 1) deal, I would be all for it. Still I am ready to have my bright-eyed, irritated baby boy back so the sooner we are off of the meds the better.
Allan still isn't quite back to normal. They were trying to get him off of his diuretics, but it didn't work so well and he ended up with a fair amount of fluid on him before they realized what was happening. They have adjusted his meds and he is peeing like a little bitty racehorse, but he is still working pretty hard. Despite this he did quite well on his developmental assessment. (Griffith didn't get assessed because of his impending surgery.) As part of the full service provided in the NICU, the boys get assessed by a physical therapist. Apparently there are certain common issues that premature babies have from a physical development standpoint. If they had stayed where they belonged, the boys would have been all snuggled up in the fetal position for a lot longer than they were. As a result of coming early, they have laid in a more open position than they would have otherwise so that the muscles on the their backs have become stronger than the ones on the front (abductors v. adductors) and there are certain exercises that we will need to do to balance that out (head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes ?.) Still Allan apparently did very well with the testing which included such things as turning his head left and right to scan for where sounds were coming from. (It didn't hurt that it was a pretty girl who was testing him.)