Luke's First Week

So I know Luke is 4 weeks old now(holy cow...time flies), but I have to document our first crazy week of his life!

Our hospital stay was great, I was feeling really good for just giving birth to an almost 10

pounder, Luke was doing well....eating...peeing....pooping occassionally, and when we

were ready to leave the hospital I didn't have anything that I was too concerned about. We left Tuesday afternoon which seemed kind of soon but the nurses for some reason said I needed to

go. It hadn't even been 48 hours from Luke's birth, but it had been "two days" considering I

gave birth 15 minutes before midnight on Sunday. I tend to like my hospital stay....I can rest

without kids climbing all over me or interrupting my sleep or me feeling like I need to be accomplishing something at the house, and it is just some "Mom and baby time". Anyways,

home we went and things were good. The boys were thrilled to have me home as well as baby

Luke....although Mom is amazing with them and they always have a blast with their Grandma!:)

Did I mention how blessed I am to have such an amazing Mom? She really is so great and I hope I can be half the mom she is one day!!

I didn't fill my prescription for my pain meds because I didn't think I would need more than

Motrin, but a few days of being home and the pain hit more than I could handle. I hurt bad...so I filled my Lortab prescription and the combination of those two pills saved my life....and of course the help of my blessed Mother and amazing husband! Doug and I took Luke into see Dr.

Carroll Friday for his 5 day check-up. He had started to look a little more yellow and so did his eyes which were a bit of a concern but we were going to see what Dr. Carroll thought. Look how neon yellow they were in this picture!!

All of our boys have had Jaundice though and I wasn't majorly concerned because when we left the hospital his bili count was on 5.2 (rather low). Dr. Carroll thought that he looked really yellow and that we should for sure get another bili count before the weekend to see if we would need to have him on the lights or not. He put an order in for the lights just so that they would be ready to go if we needed to have them delivered to us and we headed to the lab. We didn't get the results until Friday right before 5pm and he had shot up to around a 17. What a jump!! The lights didn't get there until almost 11pm Friday night...so we didn't really know how much good it would do.

His count was not going down with age or with my milk coming in. I do always supplement because it takes my milk a GOOD 5 days to come in, so I really wasn't producing much until

Thursday night.

The lights were delivered to the house and we were to have him on them constantly all

night long and head to the lab again first thing on Saturday morning at 7am. If he had gone up

more we were going to have to go back to the hospital and he was going to have to be under

stronger lights. Well, they called us Saturday around noon and said his bili count had gone up

again to around a 21 or 22. So we were off to Cardon Childrens hospital to get checked in.

They had a room waiting for us. They brought the lights into the room so I could stay with him at all times.

Here is Luke's first blanket fort!! They wanted to shade the glow a little! And check out all that hair/fur on his arm and back! He was one furry little guy....but he has lost a majority of that now! And you can see his newborn rash pretty good in these pictures too.

I could only take him off to feed him...sad....I just wanted to hold him. They put an IV in him to keep him hydrated. I hated watching that part.

The first nurse couldn't get it in so they had to have the NICU nurses come down and get one in. I hate IVs and to have one on such a little body just seems painful! Thankfully it started leaking in the middle of the night and they decided not to put another one in.

I was not to excited to be back at a hospital...even if it was a different one....but I wanted to get Luke's Jaundice under wraps too. Doug stayed with us for a while and got us situated and then he headed home for the night. There was no reason for him to stay all night...so he went home to help with the boys. It took Luke a little while to get used to being naked and only in a diaper instead of constantly swaddled and snuggled, but the lights are pretty warm and he eventually got used to it.

They came and pricked him again at 2am on Sunday morning and he was a 17....so his count was dropping, just slowly. Which is normal...it can shoot up really fast, but it takes so much longer to get it down!

The pediatrician came in first thing in the morning and said that he was happy with the results, but that we were for sure going to have to stay another night.....BLAH:(. He wanted Luke to be at least an 11 before we headed home. They would prick his foot again at 2am Monday morning to see his progress. This was going to be the 5th prick!!, when would the pricking end???

The good news was that they were going to prick him and then turn off the lights for the rest of the night! I could finally hold him and thats all I wanted to do! So I did...I held him from 2am on, he was so cozy and just nuzzled right in and slept on me the rest of the night...until the nurse came in the next morning. The pediatrician came in Monday morning and said that his count had gone down to a 12....and they were happy with that! So we could be discharged! Finally! Those two days seemed to last forever! Mostly because I was bored....I had no computer and nothing good was on TV. But I did get some good rest.

We got home and the boys were even more excited this time! It was like a second homecoming!!

Luke had to be on the lights again at home and we had an appointment to see Dr. Carroll again the following day. We had to get one more prick to check where he was at and hopefully that was going to be our last one! And it was! His last count was a 12.6 which had gone up a little, but nothing to be concerned about. Our jaundice was finally under wraps and we could get on with our adjustment of becoming a family of 6!!