Grandma and grandpa Johnson are back in town.

Taj's mom and dad drove in to Boulder on Sunday night. Bill has a NASA-related conference in downtown Boulder, and it was a good occasion for them to come back to visit us again.

This has been a tough week for Taj. Since she came down with a cold on Monday night,
she has mostly stayed away from Jac to keep him safe, and to not disturb him with her coughing. Ironically, this meant that even though Jac is only a couple of minutes away from our house, Taj has spent far less time being with him. In fact, Jac hasn't Kangarooed with Taj for 5 days. This has been really hard on her. And, on top of all this, Taj was also having difficulties with some of the aspects of the care at Boulder. I'll let her blog about her frustrations when she's ready to write about it.

It has been a tough week for Jac, too. The transport to Boulder has worn him out, and a great deal of things have changed all at once. His surroundings and the people handling him have all changed from what he had been used to for the past month. He was irritable and did not calm down very well.

One thing that we discovered is that the smallest available "Snuggly" at Bouldr was still much too loose to firmly contain Jac. He apparently was not resting well because he was getting too flopped-out within the much looser snuggly. We eventually solved this by rolling up some diaper cloths to fill in the void. He settled much nicer after that. We also scrounged up one of the really small Snuggly that he had while he was at Denver, and he switched to it on Friday afternoon.

Jac's feeds has been raised to 18ml of milk every 3 hours, with all 18 ml delivered during a 1 hour feeding period. With this change, Jac's stomach will go through cycles of being hungry and being full. The idea is to get him conditioned to what he'll experience when he starts bottle/breast feeding.

Jac also had an ROP eye exam on Friday afternoon. It's one of the most intrusive non-surgical procedures that are commonly done with preemies. He was not happy during the exam, and cried through most of it. Fortunately, he calmed down quickly afterwards. The bad news is that his eyes are still premature, so he'll need another test a week from now.

Grandma Johnson did a lot of stand-in work for mommy this week, keeping watch on Jac's progress. Jac even did a kangaroo session with grandma for two hour on Wednesday afternoon.

Also, on Thursday night, Jac kangarooed with daddy for almost seven hours!

Jac's getting really good at sucking on the pacifier. He's getting himself ready to breastfeed from mommy! He still hasn't quite gotten everything figured out -- as he focuses on the sucking, he doesn't breathe enough and ends up desaturating. Fortunately, he recovers fairly quickly - usually less than 20 seconds -- and his desats have been fairly mild (mostly high 70's/low 80's).