By the third month our routine was ingrained-we had our
schedule down, our nurse was amazing, I had the hospital completely wired (free
sandwiches…see me), we were busy saying goodbye to the other NICU mommies we’d
grown very fond of…we were in a complete holding pattern, just waiting for the
day that we could bring Lily home. There
were a lot of near misses, a lot of proposed release dates that never came to
fruition, either because Lily was choking on her food or her reflux was
completely out of control. There were
proposed surgeries and procedures and studies and experts…but everyone agreed,
“It’s just going to take time for her to grow out of this.” Have you ever told an extremely type-A person
to just sit still and wait? How did that work out for you? I guarantee whatever reaction you got, it was
way worse for Mr. or Ms. Type-A than it was for you as the messenger.
And then the doctor set a date.
I washed everything! Multiple loads a day of clothes and
bed sheets and bibs and anything that might touch my daughter. I completely forgot what sleep was because I was
finally allowed to nest and I had to get everything ready-my level of glee was
frightening.
Before they release your child from the NICU, they ask
you to spend an overnight-the nurses wake you for feeding times and you sleep
there to get accustomed to the amount of work your baby will be. So I packed a bag and go ready for a long
night. They warned me ahead of time, “your
kid has no circadian rhythm so you will be up, a lot,” but I wasn’t
worried. How bad could it be?
The first problem was that my daughter’s hospital crib
did not fit into the overnight room. The
nurses tried many times, but they couldn’t force metal through metal, so I couldn’t
sleep in the NICU. I ended up in the NICU overnight room, and a NICU nurse had
to come and wake me every three hours so that I could feed Lily. I didn’t get to sleep next to my daughter, we
were separated by two locked doors and a short hallway, but hey…it was next to
the best thing I could get. The second
problem was that Lily had an amazing night that night-she wasn’t up at all. It
was like she realized that I was there so she wanted to prove to the nurses
that she was a good baby. This wasn’t a
problem for me, but the nurses were worried that I wouldn’t get a realistic
understanding of Lily’s behavior. I made
it through the night just fine, and two days later, there we were…taking Lily
home.
The hubby packed the car-at this point we had basically
moved into the NICU, so we had a lot of stuff. I prepped all of Lily’s equipment (more on
this, later), dressed her in her adorable take me home outfit, and waited for
the car. The hubby drove and I rode in
the back with my daughter, who was finally coming home.
It’s nearly impossible to describe just how happy I was
to take Lily home. I don’t know what it
feels like to give birth and go home with the baby, so I have no frame of
reference, no control group with which to compare. I just know that everything inside me was
singing the most beautiful song in the whole entire world, and my hubby knew
all the words.
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| I took this photo, 9/28/12-the day Lily came home from the NICU-11 weeks after she was born. |
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