Day's Worth of Feeding Data

So we decided to crunch some numbers for an entire day today.  We'll give them all to you and then sort it all out.  Relating to Karsie's P.O. feeding (oral) she is being fed 8 times a day.  This past 24 hours she has been fed 6 times orally and 2 times with just the feeding tube.  Here are the times and numbers for each feed:

Midnight:  Took 62 by bottle  

3:00 - Tube only

6:00 - Tube only

9:00 - Took 34 by bottle

12:00 - Took 62 by mouth from the breast, 13 by bottle, and 8 from the tube.

15:00 - 38 by bottle

18:00 - 62 by mouth from the breast and 10 from the bottle

21:00 - 51 by bottle

All of these feeds were given the remainder to equal 70 except in the case of her eating more than she needed to.

Averages:  When we left the NICU last week she was probably averaging about 20-30 mL orally each feed.  That was on a good day.  Eating 40 was amazing for her.  Now, if you take her average of every feed, including the two feeds during the night when she was not offered the bottle, she is taking 41.5 by mouth each feed.  If we take out those times and only count the times she is offered her feeding, she is averaging 55 mL per feeding.  That's only 15 less than what she needs to be eating total.  The real exciting news about this is that twice in one complete day she finished her feeding completely by mouth. 

Our next step is to condense her feeding.  We have condensed her to 40 min. (even though it really doesn't matter when she takes so much by mouth).  After that we plan on waking her up for one of her night feeds every once in a while for the next few day and then doing it every time.  We're working on her stamina and she is responding very well.  Our doctor's appointment is tomorrow so we'll see how much weight she has gained.  Her last weight was 7 lbs. 7.5 oz.  Since then we have had all sorts of fluctuation from different scales, but none have been lower than 7 lbs. 9 oz.  Hopefully we'll see a nice high number tomorrow.