SANTA!

If you haven't seen "Elf," you should.  Hilarious.

Santa came to the NICU today and boy were we excited!  Mike and I even broke out our new Canon DSLR camera that we don't know how to use : ).  

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When I walked into the room, Dylan's nurse was telling me about how well he did at his last feeding.  He took 22 mls by bottle which is his personal best by far.  All of this was great, but as i looked at his face, something was missing!

Can you tell what it is?

Dylan is off of Oxygen!!!!!  He has only been getting a little bit lately, but he's been on some form of Oxygen for the past 11 weeks.  What a huge milestone!

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Dylan had another not to excellent first today also and I feel like it was my fault.  

I brought a really cute outfit that Dylan's Aunt Ellen got for him, but because it zipped, I couldn't work it around his cords, so I went to a different outfit.  In my excitement about how easy it was to get him dressed without Oxygen, I somehow pulled out his feeding tube while taking his shirt off!  I'm sure he didn't really mind and it's not a huge deal to put back in, but I felt bad.  Upside: there was absolutely nothing on his face during Santa pictures : ).

But grandma and I had a hard time getting him dressed in his cute little outfit.  He got jostled a bit too much and as soon as I had him all settled on the new Boppy with the cute outfit, he threw up all over everything.  Me.  The Boppy.  His outfit.  Arg.  This might be a glimpse of how things are going to be from now on with the reflux, but I felt bad because it really was my fault.  Note to self: leave Dylan alone for awhile after his feeding.  : (  If only Santa had gotten the memo.

Pictures with Santa (Dr. S) and Mrs. Claus (Nurse Jennifer) went well though and I'm really excited that we didn't miss out on this very normal baby rite of passage just because we were in the NICU.

Merry Christmas from Dylan the Elf and the rest of the Mathews Family! (Not Dylan's best pic to date...)

And one more for good measure: