the great food fight of 2010.
bigger than a david tua match or a david vs goliath; this should be an olympic sport! a battle of wills, a contest waged in the fiercest of conditions...
man ... vs baby.
i thought i would let you all know what the feeding situation is like over here in the Harlow home. it has been ... up and down. there are some days where Harlow shines. he manages his feeds with such finesse that you would think he had been born to do it. then there are days where he doesn't give a rats patootie and he will not even pretend to be interested. these are the days where it's hard.
for five days he shone with the fires of pride and accomplishment as he managed to complete the three day time feeds. for five days. Justine and i looked at each other and thought that the end of the tube may be just around the corner. wOOt!! that would be something.
of course, all good things come to an end. each night when he sleeps, Harlow has oxygen. one night, one of the taps was not turned on, and the oxygen did not flow. ever since then, the feeding has been substandard. for three days he took virtually nothing from his bottle. little toad. he is now starting to recover the ground that he has lost. we have turned the 10pm feed into a bottle feed and he is doing okay. this is all theory of course, we have no concrete evidence that it was the oxygen that caused him to lose ground.
needless to say, that damn oxygen bottle is checked twice and then twice again when he goes to bed.
i don't know if its related or not, but his sleeping routine has totally ... collapsed. he will sleep 45 minutes and then stay awake so long that he is too tired to feed anyway. then he will go down again ... for another 45 minutes and ping! again he is awake.
come on man, sleep a little!! you may as well get some practice in for your teenage years...
in a nutshell, that is most of the problems with Harlow wrapped up neatly in only a few paragraphs. if only the problems could be dealt with so easily.
all things will be well and all manner of things will be well ... with a little time.
i'm a geek and i like statistics.
to that end, i put google analytics on the blog because i was interested in knowing who, if any, are reading it.
well, i got a surprise. i have readers!! w00t!!
its a curious thing, who is reading this and where they come from. needless to say, analytics does not in any way record any personal information. the most specific it gets is what city you are in. but it is interesting none the less.
for example there has been 806 unique visitors, who, between them have visited 3078 times. over the course of those visits, they viewed an average of 1.9 pages. good stuff!
but thats not all. they have come from 15 different countries including the cayman islands, egypt, jordan, brazil, austria, singapore, russia and hong kong. i mean, how does a tinpot blog like this end up being viewed in such exotic countries? and what do they think of Harlow's adventures?
needless to say, the most visiting countries are new zealand, australia, america and the uk.
but it gets stranger. there are hits from 10 different german cities on june 1st. 10 different cities. in germany. i don't get it. i could understand 1 city, maybe a google search returned the blog as a result and they had a nosy, but 10 different cities? on the same day? that stretches coincidence a little...
there are timing statistics as well. the most common duration someone is on the blog for is 0 to 10 seconds. to the tune of 80 percent of all visits are 10 seconds or less. ha ha >:]
what about where visitors come from? most common is a direct link, most probably from the emails i send out, but the next most common sources are ohbaby, facebook, twitter and google.
i know this is small fry in terms of blogs, but i find all this kind of stuff ... fascinating.
fascination.
the kids are fascinated with Harlow. its a good thing really, it makes the sacrifices they have to make that much easier for them to bear. they love their little brother. it's a really good thing to see.
it doesn't matter if he is lying down with his nappy off, or lying in his bassinet playing with his toys, they will crowd round and watch him as if he is revealing the secrets to the universe.
he doesn't really know the secrets of the universe yet, he's at the stage when he smiles at the ceiling vent. yep ... the ceiling vent. he's fascinated. ( we're still waiting for his genius genes to kick in... )
wOOt!! he has made it to the local paper!! the whitby newsbrief has run an article about Harlow's battle and the huge rallying of support from the community. it's a great article and it just shows that even in the big smoke, there are pockets of community spirit lying around that are keen to help, even if they don't know who you are.
so, i thought for those of you who don't get the whitby newsbrief, i would put it here so you can read it too. click on the image to read a larger version.
good morning dear reader...
as you know, Harlow came home recently and is being fed by bottle and by tube. it is not an ideal situation but with the energy levels that he has, there is really no other option. with four hourly feeding, the three feeds during the day are via a bottle and he does really well at these. mostly. the three feeds at night are with the tube. they're tubed so that he has enough energy to feed from the bottle during the day.
when his energy levels are where they are supposed to be, he can knock off 140mls - 150mls without working up a sweat. 20 minutes and she's all over, red rover. thats not to say that all day time feeds are a cinch, no no. there are still feeds where he will take 20mls and quit. or 10mls. or 40mls. whatever the amount, it's not nearly enough and the rest of the meal has to be delivered al-la-tube.
so ... things were going along ok, hop skip, hop skip, skippedy-skip, and then we hit a bump in the road. a bump ... more of a small hillock i should think. he pulled out his tube. ~poof~ just like that. one moment it's there, the next, ... its gone. yikes, but didn't he holler!! just imagining doing that and i have a tear. the result is, its kinda hard to feed him.
he had that tube out for 2 days. he was doing great there to start with, and we're thinking "hey, check this out, he may not need that tube forever after all." haha... yeah, right. about three feeds in he started going down hill again. you could see it, each successive feed getting less and less. the little bugger. it just shows tho, that he cannot do this unaided.
so, two days later, the home care team visited and the tube is back. just as well. today ( about three days later ~ you can't create genius like this overnight! ) has been ... difficult. he took 2/3 of a feed at 10am, 60mls at 2pm and then maybe 100mls at 6pm. he's been all over the place. if he hadn't the tube, he would be going hungry and not growing. all kinda important things really.
the tube is not natural, it is an intrusion and unwelcome, but ... it has a part to play in keeping him alive. keeping him alive is a good thing.
sleepless smiles ... sleepless smiles ...
Harlow is the smiles part of this. he is a really really smiley guy. when you start talking to him, or when he starts noticing you talking to him, he smiles at you. his whole face lights up, his eyes crinkle and his smile gets all lopsided. it's one of the coolest things parenthood has to offer. his attention span is quite short tho, so you have to keep trying to get his attention, keep making yourself look as though you are a few sandwiches short of a picnic. i know i have mentioned this before, but i think it bears repeating. he smiles. a lot.
the other side of this is the sleepless side. with feeding happening around the clock there is no such thing as a solid nights sleep anymore. not for anyone. we have a plan tho, a plan to excise the 2am feed from our lives. there is some doubt over whether it will work or not as it involves increasing the size of the other feeds and his tummy is only so big. we're going to give it a shot however. anything to get rid of that damn feed.
thats ok tho, he is worth it.
he as a cold at the moment. his nose clogged up in the wee hours and he was frantic trying to breathe properly. i remember this happened with Cohen as well. thankfully this was not as bad as Cohen ( he ended up in hospital for a couple of nights when it happened to him ) and after maybe twenty minutes he was breathing clear again. one of the advantages of having oxygen at home.
the government has manned up and provided the carer for us. many thanks to Carole, Lorraine and Kevin for fighting that battle. her name is Jill and she gets smiles as well. lots of 'em. we are currently trying to work out a schedule for Jill that will allow Justine to do most of the school runs. it's harder than you think.
other than that things are ok. Harlow is in his big fella cot, but when he comes down stairs for play time, the other boys think he is great. i saw Cohen patting him on the head while Justine was holding him today.
the great food fight of 2010.
