The latest on Sophia: please pray.

Hello,

Everything with Sophia is relatively the same, which is good. However, we just want to ask that everyone pray for her feeding.

They are giving her bolis feeds, which is through her feeding tube, instead of being on a continuous drip. She gets a larger amount of food in a shorter amount of time, around every three hours, just like when a normal baby would eat. This is the final step to conquer before trying feeding by mouth.

At first, she was handling the bolis feeds well, but when they increased the amount of food she was eating she began to spit up a few times and has become very fussy during and around the times of her feeds. They slowed down her feeds, meaning, instead of getting 60cc's over a 45 minute time period, she gets the same amount over a 2hour time period. They hoped she would tolerate this, but today she spit up again. She only spits up a very small amount, and it could just be normal baby spit up, but the alarming thing is that she seems to be gaging a bit and this could be a sign of reflux. Also, it is hard to see her be fussy for long periods of time.

Please pray that she will be able to tolerate her bolis feeds. We are really hoping she will be able to tolerate these feeds so that she can move on to mouth feeding. They cancelled her GI test, which determines if she is a "safe Feeder" by mouth, because she has to show she can tolerate bolis feeds first. It is just hard because she has progressed so much and we had hoped that she would be able to come home this week. Of course, we have not given up hope, and she does have a very suck on her pacifier, which is a good sign for mouth feeding, but if she can't tolerate bolis feeds then we won't really get to test out mouth feeding.

We are gratful no matter what that she has improved overall, and even if we have to wait a bit longer and she has to come home with a g-tube instead of feeding by mouth, we will be happy. But of course we pray for the best, and we pray that the doctors and nurses will have great wisdom in the decisions they make and that she will tolerate these bolis feeds.

Sophia needs to tolerate her feeds for 24 hours at least before they can move to the next step so please think of her over these next few days.

Also, she has an echo scheduled for tomorrow to look at her heart. Please pray that we continue to see less regurgitation, or even that her heart is totally healed.

Thank you so much for weathering these ups and downs with us.

Love,
Samuel, Benita, and Sophia