Good-bye Monitor? - 10/6

Last week we went to the Neonatology Clinic for a check-up. Nothing too exciting happened, which is why I didn’t post about it right away, but I needed an excuse to use this really cute picture of Averi having a moment with her giraffe. (It was lying on the ground next to her and she totally rolled over on her side and stared it in the face for like 15 minutes straight.)
Averi’s monitor has been having brady (low heart rate) alarms lately when she is sleeping. It used to only go off when she was refluxing and couldn’t breathe. The neonatology clinic downloads her monitor so they looked at the recording and said it is probably just because she is getting bigger and has a lower resting heart rate.

She then told me that we probably don’t need the monitor anymore. I was stuck between relief of not having to carry it around anymore and paranoia that she would start refluxing during the night and we would not hear her. Just as I was accepting it, she came back and said that Averi has to keep the monitor until after her surgery but we need to start weaning ourselves off of it.

Now it only has to be on at night, while riding in the car, and when she is unattended. It’s nice not having it on all the time and carrying it around, especially when we go out, but I can still sleep at night.

As far as the rest of the appointment, she is growing like crazy, weighing in at 10 pounds 12 ounces (finally double her birth weight at 5 months), her muscle tone is great, the dietician gave us an updated feeding advancement, she’s being referred for OT and PT, and we’ll go back after the surgery.