Jax Beach Diet

The diet is simple. First of all stop eating. Make sure your starting weight is 1 pound 4 ounces. Then live off of IV fluids for a month. Don’t get out of bed – if necessary defecate on yourself. After a month take 1 ounce of human breast milk every 3 hours. Continue to defecate on yourself. After 81 days if you start out at 20 ounces of body weight, you will end up at 4 pounds. I know the diet works because that is what happened to my son. He is now 4 pounds and celebrated by defecating on himself. If my calculations are correct (I’m an accountant – so they are correct), that’s doubling his body weight in a month. For those of you who know my parents, they left the country for part of last month. If any of you remember the day that they returned, that was the day Jordan hit 2 pounds. We thought he was so big.

It was a red letter day yesterday. Normally at 4 pounds, this NICU takes babies out of the isolette and puts them into cribs. However, Jordan’s doctor believes in letting babies stay in the isolette until they take all of their feeds by bottle. It’s quiet and darker in there which she believes helps growth. I can't argue with her reasoning. If there is one thing this doctor knows, it’s how to fatten Jordan up. He is big enough that they keep his isolette at 82 degrees – 3 degrees cooler than I keep my house, about 10 degrees colder than the high temperature outside yesterday, and a full 20 degrees colder than my younger sister keeps her house.

His ROP has remained unchanged yesterday. He had an appointment with the physical therapist, but no one knows how he did. The therapist apparently writes poorly (Who handwrites in 2007?), and only told the doctor the results. I don’t need to bother the doctor to know how he is though. Yesterday we put him on his back in one of his snugglies. There’s a picture of him in a snugglie below on Sept 7th and he is outgrowing it. Anyway, we put him in a bigger one on his back. He starts flailing and kicking and fussing. We get the point and turn him on his belly. He starts kicking harder and fussing more. Then he turns his head over, kicks his legs out of the snugglie, and stretches his arms straight out to the side. Then he goes to sleep. I think his muscles work fine.

Back when we got on the roller coaster, the mama Ali would see other mamas and get a little jealous. They would come in and take their babies out and tend to the babies. We had to ask permission to touch his feet – and get told no half the time. Now, the situation has reversed. We went in yesterday and picked up the baby and tended to the baby on our own. Except for getting the bottle, we didn’t need the nurse at all. We held him, we fed him, we decided when to put him back, we put him back, we made his bed, we cleaned up after he defecated on himself. Tonight we will do it again. We’ll do it every night for the next month, then he’ll probably be big enough to stand up and defecate on himself.