Thank God for you, our friends and family, who held us up in prayer during such a challenging time in our lives! Many of you had prayer requests out to your churches and study groups, I know that we must have had legions of people praying for us! We definately felt so uplifted by Him and still do now. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts, your thoughts and prayers are the best gift we could ask for! The power of prayer is awesome as no miracle is too great when we come to the Lord united!
Thank you for all the kind emails, phone calls and comments left to us. Every one of them means so much. I apologize for not returning emails or phone calls. I am going to try and update this site as much as possible, but between visiting the NICU, caring for Isaiah, pumping every few hours and trying to recover from labor, our schedule allows for very little free time! We are tired but so happy and hopeful. Even though this birth was not as we imagined, so far the outcome is more than what we expected! Lilianna is so strong and fiesty, she's got us all amazed, including the doctors and nurses! We are fortunate to live very close to the hospital, so we see her as much as we can. We still miss our Lily madly every minute of the day, but we know she's in excellent hands. The nurses in the NICU are simply amazing and we're so blessed that she is in their very capable hands! There are a few that are Christians and they spend the begining of their shifts praying for Lily and the other babies there. To learn that just filled our hearts with so much joy and comfort.
As of now, Lily has gained over 3 ounces, making her just over 3 lbs, 10 oz. She is a tiny doll of a baby girl! She is smaller than those Preemie Cabbage Patch dolls we had as kids. You wouldn't believe how small her fingers and toes are. She is keeping her temperature well, and hopefully (the doctor tells us) that she will move from an incubator into an open cradle where the temperature is not regulated. If she can keep her temperature stable on her own that would be a huge step forward! She's bottle feeding quite well, Dave and I have been educated on the tricks of feeding a preemie! There are still sometimes though that she gets really tired out, and she has to still be fed with a syringe and feeding tube (inserted through the nostril going straight into her throat). We are hoping for more progress on that, and that the feeding tube be gone completely. She hates to have it in and has actually ripped it out herself once.
Lily makes the funniest faces and has the cutest expressions! She likes to lift just one eyebrow and open her mouth when you say something interesting. Sometimes she looks like a tiny old lady. She's got us and the nurses cracking up!
When will she come home? The doctors tell us there is no magic number- they don't wait for a certain weight. They simply wait until she is demonstrating that she can consistently feed, keep warm, poop, pee and function like a regular newborn. So far, she is very well on her way to doing that. A few days ago one of the doctors told me at the long end it would be 2 weeks, and the short end of the spectrum 10 days. But yesterday, one of the doctors called and said possibly 5-6 days because she is acting way beyond her size and gestational age (see already she is a genius)! We are trying not to get our hopes up... we want her home, but we're also a little nervous about our own capabilities, and her tiny size. We're just praying for God's perfect timing for her homecoming. That is what matters the most to us right now.
That is all for now... I'm sure more pictures will be posted soon, (it's hard to get good pictures in the NICU because we don't like to use harsh flash and the lighting in there is very low). Thanks again for your continued prayers!
All of our love,
The Sanchez Family
