Welcome home, Allan!

Well, we made it. This blog is coming to you from the nursery -- Allan is in his crib, listening to Baby Mozart. Griffith is hanging out in the living room with his dad, probably watching sports of some sort. So far we are just keeping pace with the boys. (Actually, they are probably slightly ahead.) Of course, we had Miss Flora until six and then Kim came over about 7:30 or so with dinner. So, here we are at nine, finally going one on one with our boys. The first night Griffith came home we had a big thunderstorm and, coincidentally, there is one blowing up right now. Maybe it is a good omen. So far we have managed okay with the oxygen compressor, the feed pump and the O2 monitor. That'll last as long as it takes Allan to pull out one tube or the other. I ended up putting a sock on his right hand because he kept tugging on his NG tube and I figure that although we've both put it in before, there really isn't any real reason to start out with that on the first night.
Allan had his occupational therapy evaluation to assess whether he has an oral aversion (funny to think of eating as an occupation, but apparently it is if you do it right). Anyway, he doesn't have an oral aversion. What he has done is actually pretty clever. According to the OT, Allan has only limited resources for eating and breathing. Clearly he has to do both and, by throwing back his head, he has found a way to maximize both. We are to let him continue to do so. So we bottle-feed 3 times a day for 30 minutes. If he finishes the bottle, perfect. If he doesn't, then we feed the remainder through the NG tube. Then at night, he is hooked to a pump that delivers a set amount of food per hour for 12 hours to ensure that he gets the proper nutrition. As he gets bigger and stronger, we should be able to increase bottle feeding and eventually discontinue the pump.
Miss Flora was very impressed with our other boy and set about spoiling him as rotten as Griffith. She was supposed to get here at 7:30 this morning and Griffith was sleeping like an angel until about 7:28 at which point he began to wail like someone was killing him. That's how I had to greet Flora. This only confirmed her suspicions about how mistreated her boy is. After she took him, he proceeded to wimper to her like he was telling her all about how awful it had been without her. Ingrate.
Once again, the boys are completely unimpressed with each other. Neither of them will look at the other. Everyone said that they'll entertain each other, but, so far, no dice.
Tomorrow we head out for the pediatrician's. It should be big fun taking this show on the road.
I'll try to post lots of pictures of the homecoming for your entertainment.