12/8/07

Elis has reached another milestone today - he had his first oral feed! He is usually fed through a tube which goes from his mouth right into his stomach (it's the green one you can see on the photos), but today he took 10ml from a syringe in his mouth!

His corrected age is now about 34 weeks gestation (still six weeks before he should have been born) and it is usually in the next few weeks that unborn babies begin to develop the 'suck' reflex. Elis was getting hungry as his 12pm feed approached and was showing signs of wanting to feed himself so the nurse and I propped him up in his incubator and stuck the end of a syringe of milk in his mouth. Hey presto, he worked out how to breathe, suck the milk and then swallow it all at once!! It was really lovely to see and he surprised us both (and himself, I think). He polished off 10ml in under five minutes but was pretty shattered after the effort so the rest of it went down his tube.

After his momentus lunch, he came out for some 'kangaroo care' (skin to skin cuddle) for the afternoon and was very well behaved.