Look out world - I'm born!!

So, following Mom's doctor appointment last Monday, the doctors agreed that her blood pressure issue was serious enough that pre-term delivery was necessary. So that evening, 4 weeks before the due date, Mom and Dad packed their bags and headed to the hospital to have me! And after 60 hours of induced labor and 1.5 hours of pushing, I eventually made my entrance into the world at 7:18am on Thursday, September 11th, 2008. We were all pretty exhausted from the long process (look at how horrible we look in these pictures!) but are recovering quite well now.

At birth, I weighed 5 pounds, 11.1 ounces and was 19.5 inches long. Since I was a premie (which is short for PREMIUM, not PREMATURE), I have been staying in the special care nursery in the hospital with the two other coolest babies in the hospital. All of the "regular" babies have a different room which I hear is pretty lame. Overall, I'm quite healthy; I've even been showing off the excellent capabilities of my lungs whenever they take my clothes off to change my diaper. There are just a couple of concerns that the doctors have that are making them hold me hostage here until I get all better:

I was born with a pretty large bruise on the top of my head which was really sore for the first couple of days. It is healing up nicely now, though, and you can barely even tell that I spent 2 days banging my head up against an unripe cervix.

A few days ago, I started turning into a pumpkin. Yep, like most premies - I've developed a mild case of jaundice. Apparently the best way to treat it is to strip me down to my diaper and put me on the beach for the day. It seemed to work because my color looks much better now! I'm convinced that a day in the sun can cure pretty much anything.

I started out as quite a poor eater. Whoever knew that the comment, "your baby sucks!" would be a compliment?!? After my first day of life, I was eating so little that the doctors put a feeding tube in me to feed me whatever I didn't eat on my own from the bottle. And although I wasn't quite as cute with a tube sticking out of my nose, I have to admit that I really liked sleeping cuddled up next to Mom while getting fed through a tube. Afterall, that's what'd I'd been doing for 8 whole months!! I'm eating MUCH better now, though. They only had to keep the tube in me for a day before I gained enough sleep and energy to feed from a bottle for an entire half hour. They keep upping the amount of food I'm supposed to eat, and at this point, I'm eating MORE than that (I'm quite the overachiever)! I especially like it when Mom brings me in breastmilk that she's pumped. It just tastes WAY better than that formula stuff they give me...probably because she keeps eating chocolate pudding and cheesecake from the hospital cafeteria. YUMMY! Mom and I are now working on breastfeeding and as soon as we both master that, we get to go home! It looks like we may even be out of here as early as Wednesday!