Mama Kangaroo

This past weekend I was able to begin Kangaroo Care with Adrianna.  Kangaroo Care is holding your preemie on your chest with skin-to-skin contact.  It promotes bonding between mother and baby, and better regulates baby's breathing, temperature, and heart rate, helps them gain weight, and reduces risk of infection. (It also encourages breastfeeding, very important, but clearly not applicable in our case!) One study also showed that during Kangaroo Care, the brain waves associated with contentment and bliss doubled!  Kangaroo Care was started by a doctor in Colombia where there was a shortage of equipment needed to care for premature babies.  The mortality rate dropped from 70% to 30% once Kangaroo Care was implemented.  You may also recall the story several months ago about a mother in Australia (of course!) whose infant was believed to be dead.  She held him on her chest and after two hours he revived!

Saturday evening I held Adrianna like this for an hour, Sunday afternoon I held her for an hour and 45 minutes, and Monday evening we Kangarooed for 2 hours.  Besides being benefical for her, it's nice for me to have some quiet time - time to pray, time to hope and dream about Adrianna's future. Last night I also changed her diaper for the first time, and although it was a little tricky, I think my experience of changing 1000's of diapers over the past 3 years definitely came in handy.  The picture below shows one of her diapers next to one of Adrian's giant size 4's.  (She's actually now wearing one size larger, but those are a little big and need to be folded down in the back and the front.)

Adrianna currently weighs 2 pounds 6 ounces.  Yesterday her doctor upped the amount of protein she's receiving in order to get her to gain weight more quickly.  I'm hoping that between the added protein and the Kangaroo Care, she'll start gaining more weight so we can get her home where she belongs.