I don’t know why, but I always find the third night in the hospital to be one of the hardest.  Mark and I trade off nights, so it’s not like I have had three nights in a row. For some reason, I just find myself a little more restless. Yes, Lyra is back in the hospital. We ate breakfast Christmas morning with the family, opened presents, then drove to the ER.  It’s not like we knew she needed to go to the hospital when we woke up Christmas morning, but we knew she wasn’t doing great. She hadn’t been doing great for awhile. However, once she was throwing up when we weren’t feeding her at all, we knew we had to go in.

So, here we are again.

At this point, some of the nurses on the floor know us from our last stay. At what point do you get a parking space? We were just here a month ago.

This time it looks like the doctors may try something new. The hard part is, no one really has an answer for us. We have no idea why Lyra stops tolerating her feeds. We have no idea why she won’t eat by mouth. The answer we most commonly get is, “she just needs to get bigger.” But, how can she get bigger if she just keeps throwing up? It doesn’t seem like anyone has a good answer for that. As frustrating as that is, it seems the team we are working with now wants to do more than just get her to “stable enough” and send us home to figure things out for ourselves. We may be changing the type of feeding tube she has (if she is big enough), and they aren’t going to send us home without solid confirmation that she is tolerating her feeds really well. As much as I would love to be home, this is where she needs to be.

And we really did have a wonderful Christmas morning.

Sitting on Aunt Kristi’s Lap before Breakfast

Sleeping on Daddy in the Christmas quilt after getting her IV