as his nurse donna said today, eric enjoys making a liar out of her. just yesterday she said that it would be a few days before they discontinued his IV drip and had him solely on breastmilk. but today when we arrived at the nicu we found him sans his IV lines and taking in 5.2 cc's of milk an hour!

as soon as we stood over his bed, he opened his eyes and made this gesture as if to say, "geee. it's so nice to wake up and see you again." or at least that's what we'd like think think he was saying :-)

the best part of getting "full feeds" is that he's had two IV lines removed. one of them, the peripheral intravenous cardiac catheter (PICC), was causing the bulbous thing earlier in the week so it's nice to have that gone. they also removed an arterial line from his foot.

as an added bonus, removing the lines makes it much easier to move him around during kangaroo care.

occasionally, when he's getting feisty, he'll push his feet against the plastic wrap that covers his bed which is meant to help keep the heat in.

this is probably one of the toughest photos i've shot as the light levels are very low so i have to have a slow shutter speed and and the auto focus wouldn't work due to the diffuse and wierd light coming off the plastic wrap. if i were a better photographer, i would have been able to capture the times that he rammed his foot so hard into the wrap that it looked like he was going to break through it.

incidentally, i've been under the delusion that the plastic wrap was probably some sort of hospital grade super magical polymer. eventually i noticed the large rolls that the staff has delivered from the local restaurant distributer.