We appreciate your prayers for Nathan

As you can see, we never lack in photos of Nathan to share with you all!

Nathan continues to bring us lots of joy, love, happiness and laughter. He's a typical two month old - laughing, smiling, cooing, growing and learning to put his hands into his mouth (thankfully he hasn't found his thumb yet) - often getting frustrated when he can't get his WHOLE hand into his mouth!

I had mentioned in an earlier post that he is still on oxygen. Thankfully, we are able to take him off the oxygen when he is awake, so that makes it a bit easier to move around. The saturation level in his blood is good now, so if it were just for that, we could take him off the oxygen.

However - due to a condition called PDA (click here to read more about it), he still needs to be on the oxygen. A pediatrician friend of ours from the US explained the condition to us like this:

The duct you are talking about in Nathan is the ductus arteriosis. When babies are inside mom's they don't need blood to go to the lungs because they get oxygen from mom's blood through the placenta. So there is a little "detour" vessal called the ductus arteriosis that takes off from the artery headed for the lungs and dumps that blood right over onto the side of blood flow that takes it directly to the body where it picks up it's oxygen from the blood coming in from the placenta.

At birth, this little vessel usually closes in response to factors that are not entirely clear to us. There are a small set of babies (often premature or with other problems) in which the closure does not occur. Many of these will eventually close on their own, but a few have to be done surgically. Though it is scary to think of surgery in little Nathan, it is not the same as "open heart surgery" as it is often accessable from a small incision in the back or at times can even be done by using a cardiac catheter through one of the arteries in his leg and inserting a small coil into the little duct to close it. It sounds like your doctor is on top of this and they are watching it, so hang in there. We'll be praying that it closes on its own.

The doctor here feels that to help him with this condition as well as the fact that he still has high arterial pressure in his lungs, he still needs to be on oxygen . . . we hope that the oxygen will continue to help his lungs develop well and to help the duct close on its own.

We will have his usual monthly appointment with his pediatrician March 25. And then another ultrasound of his lungs/heart the end of April. At that time, we will be able to see if the duct is closing like it should.

Please continue to pray that the duct in Nathan's lungs would close - we'd love to see some improvement by the time of the ultrasound the end of April. Now that we have had two months with our little baby and know him so much better, it seems like the thought of another surgery is even harder to bear. But we keep trusting him in God's hands, knowing that God has a plan for him - our little gift from heaven.