Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Corn and Cheese Chowder

This week we tried a new recipe. It was really good!

Corn and Cheese Chowder

4tbs butter
1/2 onion, diced
3 slices bacon, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 can corn, drained
1 can creamed corn
1/4c flour
3c chicken broth
2c half and half
2c shredded monterey jack or cheddar cheese
1/4c green onion

In a large pot, melt butter over medium-high heat. Cook onions for a few minutes, then add in bacon and diced bell peppers. Cook until soft. Add in corn and simmer a couple more minutes.

Sprinkle flour over mixture, and stir. Then add in broth and simmer for 3-4 minutes.

Reduce heat to low, then stir in half-and-half, and cover to thicken. Simmer about 15 minutes.

Stir in cheese and green onion. Once cheese is melted, salt and pepper to taste.



We didn't have any green onion so I left that out. It was very flavorful!!!

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Kanaan's Kronicles...1 Month Old!

Kanaan is 1 month old! At his check up on 10/7/13 he weighed 8lbs 13oz, 1 pound 1 ounce bigger than when he was born. He's 20 3/4" long. He wears size 1 diapers and newborn clothes. His umbilical cord fell off when he was 3 weeks old, and he had his first tub bath on 9/28/13. He LOVES his bath even when I wash his hair. The only time he cries is when we take him out. He rolled from his tummy to his back on 9/26/13 during tummy time. He transitioned from Enfamil Enfacare to Enfamil Newborn formula and he gets a combo of formula and breastmilk. He only cries when he's hungry or I'm putting lotion on him. He loves to get lotion on his back, but screams when I put it on his tummy. He's gotten much better about getting his diaper changed, he only cries about 50% of the time and that's usually because he just got out of the bath or is hungry. He eats every 3 hours during the day and will go anywhere from 3-5 hours at night.

His schedule is:

8:30am - wake up time/eat/get dressed
9:30am - nap
11:30am - eat
12:30pm - nap
2:30pm - eat
3:30pm - nap
5:30pm - eat
8:30pm - eat

His last scheduled nap is 3:30pm, he does nap between 5:30 and 8:30pm but we try to distract him and keep him awake as much as possible. We also try to give him his bath and get his pjs on between the last 2 scheduled feedings. His last scheduled feeding is 8:30pm. After his 8:30pm feeding we let him sleep until he wakes up on his own and he usually goes at 3-5 hours between feedings at night. I'm going to start trying to stretch it to a schedule starting at 9am so that when the time change happens he'll be on an 8am schedule.

Here are some pictures from his 1 month photo shoot!









Saturday, October 12, 2013

Kanaan's Newborn Photos

Here are some of the newborn photos we had taken of Kanaan. He was 3 weeks in these.











Friday, October 11, 2013

Kanaan's Kidney Update

On September 25th we went back to Springfield for Kanaan's nephrology appointment. His appointment went really well. He weighed 8lbs 6oz and was 20 1/2inches long. His labs look good. They were a little better overall than when we left the hospital. His creatinine level was down to 2.0, which is still very elevated, but is an improvement! His calcium level was slightly elevated, but nothing that was too high. However, since he is gaining weight well, the doctor decided we can discontinue fortifying his breastmilk and he can get the formula made as directed instead of extra concentrated. He also said once we run out of the Enfacare formula we can give him Enfamil Newborn. That is a relief because Enfacare is much more expensive than the regular newborn formula and you can only get it with a doctors order. That should help his calcium level because he is getting less calcium in each bottle. He also said instead of the sodium chloride, we can just give him 1/8th tsp of table salt per day. Which is so much easier, in order to give him the correct amount of sodium chloride we would take a 1 gram tablet of sodium chloride and crush it and dissolve it in 10ml of water. Then we would draw up 0.88ml in a syringe to give to him. Now we can just put the salt in one of his bottles each day. He said that we can get a weight check and labs drawn in Quincy once a week and have the labs sent to him and he would call with any changes to his care.

Dr. Seifert's nurse called on 10/10/13 saying that Kanaan's latest labwork looks great! Everything is better than it was the last time, and his Creatinine level is at 1.5 now! She said that since his levels have been so stable that we can skip labwork next week and just do them every other week now! Yay! I hate seeing them stick Kanaan's little arm trying to get blood. This week they had to stick both arms because they couldn't get it in the first arm. :( She said that if his level stay stable/improving for a month we could drop to monthly labs. We go back to Dr. Seifert on October 30th for a follow up.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Kanaan's Kronicles...Newborn!

I wanted to do a newborn post on Kanaan before I post his 1 month post, so this is like a flashback post. Kanaan came home from the hospital on September 15th at 11 days old. He had gotten down to 7lbs 3oz at his smallest and was 7lbs 6oz when we came home. He was on a great schedule from being in the NICU, once we were at home he has been pretty consistant on staying on it and sleeps pretty well at night. He will wake up every 3-4 hours and go right back to sleep. He hardly every cries unless he's hungry or just wants to be left alone. He likes his pacifier when he is going to sleep or is hungry and waiting for his milk to heat up.  He gets breastmilk fortified with Enfamil Enfacare or Enfacare made concentrated to make it 24 calories to help him gain weight. We really have to work with him to keep him awake to eat his whole bottle, of course once the bottle is gone he's wide awake. He gets 3.5ml of BiCitra twice a day and .88ml of Sodium Chloride every 6 hours in his milk. We put the medicine in a bottle with a little bit of milk. We give him that bottle first, while he's really hungry because he is so hungry that he doesn't notice the taste as much. If we put it in his whole bottle he won't eat the whole thing and then doesn't get the whole dose. Even with giving him the medicine bottle first he will still fight it at times and we have have to give him a few sucks of regular milk and then swap the bottle back to the medicine and back and forth. He wears newborn clothes and is in size newborn diapers, he drinks about 70ml of milk in each bottle.

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