Today's has been a roller coaster ride for the three of us.  Around 1:00 AM the nurses decided to extubate Zoe (take her off the ventilator and remove the tube that goes into her lungs).  I was over at the NICU when they did it because I wanted to hear her little cries.  Jason and I have never heard her make any noise since she has been intubated ever since she was born and the tube goes between her vocal chords.  They placed Zoe on a nasal canula which supplies oxygen through the nose but doesn't provide the pressure to the lungs that the ventilator does.  She did really quite well for a while,  she was on a higher oxygen flow but that was to be expected since she was being forced to do all the work that the ventilator had been doing.  She cried a bit when they moved her around, it sounded like little raspy meows.  She did really pretty good over night but by the time I came back in the morning around 9:00 she was pretty worn out from her lungs working so hard.  The doctor decided to put her on a different machine called a C-PAP, which provides pressurized air through the nose.  She wasn't able to keep up the good oxygen levels that they wanted to see so it was decided to put her back on a ventilator around 12:00.  As much as I don't want to see her on a ventilator it was a relief to see her back on it because she looks so much more peaceful and isn't struggling as hard.  She will probably be on the ventilator for several days before they try the nasal canulas again. I'm told it's not unusual for the first extabation to fail, just because it is so exhausting for the babies to breathe.  Her lung did collapse over the course of the several hours on her own, so it will take a day or so to get it inflated again.  The doctors and nurses still seem hopeful so we're trying not to worry too much. She did have to give up her big girl crib because of the ventilator, but I guess that's the lesser of all evils.  Hopefully she'll have a great night and keep resting.