Can you imagine a cuter Easter basket?!?

April 9th – 11th

Dylan continued to be progress on everything really quickly. He’s quite the rock star around the unit and charms all of the nurses and doctors. They started him on a very small amount of breast milk fed continuously through a tube that goes down through his nose and into his stomach. The small amount was to make sure that his stomach/intestines could handle digesting the food. He digested it great, but it appeared to aggravate him to get a taste of food in his stomach, but such a miniscule amount. (Apparently, even though they were supplementing with plenty of calories through the IV, it doesn’t create that same feeling of fullness.) Luckily, like the champ that he is, he took the food super well and they quickly advanced him to bolus feedings (a bigger feeding over 30-60 minutes).

Dylan continued to breathe a little rapidly (very common with abdominal surgery patients because of the additional pressure on his lungs by them pushing the intestines back inside.) However, we all very much enjoyed the ability to hold him now that he was off the vent and quickly made up for some lost snuggling time!




April 12th

Our favorite nurse Kristen decided to celebrate Easter with us by taking care of Dylan. And of course, leave it to Kristen to make it one of the most memorable Easters most of us have ever experienced (and in case we forget, we have about a thousand pics of it, I’m just putting some of my favorites up here). We show up to the hospital on Sunday morning and see an Easter basket (thanks Matt!). Not unusual, you would think…until Kristen says, I can’t wait to put him in the Easter basket! So, we dressed Dylan in his “Spring Chicken” outfit (everything has to work with the theme, right?) and put him into the Easter basket. He didn’t seem to mind it too much, but gave me the classic Zach look of I can’t believe you are doing this to me, even though I secretly like it. And I swear, just once, I think I saw Dylan shake his head at me…

We had a great time taking all of the pictures, and of course nurses from all over the floor stopped by to see how cute he looked…and to comment on how amusing it was to have a picture of a baby in a basket.