January 22nd, 2007 7:45 p.m.

With most of the serious complications of last week behind her, Lauren continues to progress slowly, but much faster than anyone anticipated, including her doctors. Freed of the infection, she can now dedicate most of our energy into increasing her feedings so that she start growing. The early feedings were successful in starting up her digestive system, which apparently is very slow to crank back up. She has been remarkably stable over the last four or five days, which has allowed our medical staff to rapidly increase her feedings, and she is now up to 9 ccs every 2 hours. (Just a few days ago she was at 2 ccs every 4 hours. So, she has come along way.) She put on 20 grams yesterday, and now weighs in at 1178 grams, which is about 2.4 lbs. (We keep thinking she is closer to 3 lbs - maybe it is wishful thinking...) Her heart rate and vitals remain "rock solid" as one of her nurses likes to say. She is slowly coming off the bubble cpap, but that will take several weeks if not months to complete. We are confident that she is now on a good path that will ultimately lead to a happy homecoming sometime in mid March or early April. Many thanks for your continued thoughts and prayers (and food).

Grant and Kaia