Welcome to CCN (no, not CNN)

November 24 (PM) - This post is our second blog post of the day. The more important one, namely how Grady Jeremiah is doing, is posted below. Don't miss that one! Since Julia and I spend so much time with the little guy, I thought I would give you a glimpse of "home" for us during the day.No big nursery ~ For those of you who have had premature babies or know someone who has, you may know the concept of the nursery. It was a large sterile-looking hospital room with lots of premature babies in it. UAB has done away with that. Every baby in the neonatal ICU or the continual care nursery has a private room so that the parents can spend a lot of time with their child. UAB has the largest private room facility for premature babies in the nation, and it is a new facility that has been open less than one year. It is amazing! If you want to see their quick picture tour of it, which shows more than just our room, click here.Our room in CCN ~ 48 hours ago we were moved out of the Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (called RNI or RNICU or NICU... they have about as many abbreviations here as Southern Baptists use!) to the Continuous Care Nursery (or CCN). We really are enjoying our time in CCN so far. Like in RNI, little guy still is in his isolette with all of the same monitors and equipment attached (seen to the left in the picture - you can click on the picture to see a larger version). We still have a sofa and recliner, a mini-fridge to keep food, and drawers and a cabinet to store our things (all to the right in the picture). We still have wireless internet so we can work (with the occasional facebook break!). But we now have a private bathroom in his room that even has a shower! It makes it even easier to spend time with him. And the "icing on the cake" is that we were blessed with one of the few rooms with a window! It is really helping our state of mind and body clocks to be able to see daylight and know what is happening outside (in addition to being able to watch the trains in the distance... something fascinating to me!). While we sit in his room, we regularly watch his monitor. If you click on the picture to the right, you will see what we watch. The top green line is his heart rate. Occasionally he will have a drop in heart rate called a brady when he quits breathing. That little monitor starts blinking red, a loud alarm goes off, and the nurse comes running! On the blue line below we watch the oxygen saturation of his red blood cells. They have a red light monitor around his foot that measures these levels. The doctors want it to be between 85-95% saturated. When he drops below 85, a desat alarm goes off. The bottom line is his respiration rate. We are amazed at the technology present in this room that keeps a 24/7 watch over our little guy and alerts us and the nurses if something is not right. However, more than that we rest assured knowing that our God who never sleeps or slumbers is constantly watching over our little guy.