Home again...
As you can see, the family is resting at home again, although clearly some of us are getting more rest than others.

Juliette was discharged from the NICU on Saturday. After they discontinued her phototherapy, her bilirubin rebounded slightly from 9.5 to 11.3, but the neonatologists said it was still low enough to send her home. When we saw the pediatrician on Monday, she was up to 15.5, so we're going back for another check tomorrow (Wednesday). Hopefully, we've hit a plateau or gone down. A bilirubin of 20 or more is kind of the magic number that will send us back to the hospital. The pediatrician is optimistic that we'll avoid that, but indicated some babies stay at the ~15 level for several months, especially breastfed babies.

Juliette lost a few ounces since we left the hospital, so we're trying to feed her more agressively now. The pediatrician recommended that we bottle feed her, since she's very drowsy and it takes less effort for her to get milk from the bottle. Which means I spend about 20 minutes pumping milk, then 20 minutes giving her a bottle. And the process repeats itself about every 2 hours which doesn't leave much time for anything else, like sleep. So I'm hopeful that she's gained some weight at her check-up tomorrow and maybe we can stop the bottle feeding soon.

Sean goes back to work tomorrow. Poor him and poor us. The daytime should be fine, since Erika will come back tomorrow and will be in charge of the boys during the day. But if he has to go to work in the morning, that leaves me on my own for the night shift. He usually takes the diaper phase of the feeding process which buys me an extra 5 minutes of sleep at least. I will miss those precious minutes.

Oh well, been at the computer much too long. I'm so relieved we're starting to get some semblance of normalcy to our routine and I finally had some time to take a few pictures today. One is posted above and a few others are on the KodakGallery page.

Happy New Year!