The Eye of Kris

Ivan is continuing his progress towards normal infant life. He's no longer getting extra oxygen, although there is still a tube feeding regular air into his nose. That will hopefully be removed tonight.

He has started eating from a bottle a little more, but not yet enough to remove the feeding tube or to try nursing him. The last time I fed him he took about a fifth of his bottle naturally, but then got tired so we had to use the tube for the rest. For whatever reason, they were not warming the bottles beyond room temperature, so I suggested they try the next one a little warmer and hopefully he will respond better to that.

We are home again for the night and ate some great sandwiches which were left over from Lael Fadely's first birthday party, which, regrettably, we missed yesterday. Owen was able to be there, though, so I'm sure he represented the Kelso household well (and probably ate all of our share of birthday cake).

Less than an hour ago, Travis dropped Owen off at our house, and he was so excited to see us and be home. It's hard to believe that we went 4 days without seeing him! It was already past his bedtime, but of course we let him play and talk a little and read some stories to him. He told us about going to Chloe's house and Jayna's house and Grant-Dean's house and how he went to a birthday party and played with balloons and trains and all sorts of other things. He was resistent to going to bed for a very short while, but I think his tiredness soon caught up with him and he was glad to lay down when we finally made him.

We have been told by many of our friends who kept him over the last four days that he has been so well behaved for them. I'm so glad to have such an easy-going kid. It made it just that much easier to deal with this whole situation with Ivan knowing that Owen was well taken cared for and not causing anyone too much trouble. A great big thanks again to all of our friends who took care of him (as well as those who offered to help but didn't get the chance).

Oh, yeah - as Owen came in the house, he said "I like that Travis".

Tomorrow, I'm going to go ahead and go to church and teach my class, and Mary will stay home to get some rest and spend time with Owen. Then we'll take Owen with us to the hospital for the afternoon. He won't be allowed in the NICU, but being a children's hospital, they have a lot of play areas and interesting things for kids to do and see. We probably won't stay real late because of having Owen there, but at least we will be able to take turns visiting Ivan a little. Monday, we'll spend most of the day there again while Owen stays at the next-door neighbor's.

If all goes well, we will take Ivan home on Tuesday!