Home for One Year

October 11, 2006... the day our boys finally came home from the hospital! Jacob and Rylan were in the hospital for 50 days. They had each doubled in size since their birth, coming home at 6.4 lbs and 7.2 lbs. We had gone from being on a ventialtor to breathing on their own. From being all tube fed to all meals on the bottle or breast. Both boys were still have bradicardia and apena epsiodes, so we did come home on apena monitors.

Let me tell you a little about life with the apena monitors. First, the alarm is LOUD!!! The first few days home it must have gone off 1000 times - mostly from us stepping on the wires, or the leads slipping off their chests, etc. However, each time to alarm sounded, we all came running. Second, people look at you weird in public when your kids are hooked up to monitors. I can not count the number of times strangers came up to us and asked all about the boys and their problems. Now I am used to people asking, but at first it hurt for people to give you "the look" or not want to touch your baby. Third, it is a pain to cart the monitors all over the place. They were hooked up 24/7 for 7 months and we had to learn how to live with the monitors - like how to deal with the monitor while changing diapers, nursing babies, going to church, etc. All in all, I am glad that we had the monitors. It gave us a peace of mind that they were breathing. And the Lord blessed us with no huge episodes where we had to do CPR or anything. But we were glad to see them grow out of needing the monitors.

Back to October 11, 2006... the night before Jason and I spent the night in the NICU. They have a hotel room like area for parents to sleepover before they take home the babies. Kind of like a practice zone. Our night was a diaster! We got there at 8:30 thinking that the nurses would have already fed them their 8:00 bottle, but they had not. Then it took about 30 minutes to get us all settled into the room. So at 9:00pm we have 2 screaming, hungry babies and I am trying to nurse them both at the same time (for only the second time ever) in a strange hospital hotel room. Jason and I were exhausted and did not hardly sleep at all. Turns out that was probably the worst night yet with the babies - thankfully!!!

That morning, I woke up crying and I cried all day long. I was so happy and nervous and ready to have the boys home. I cried all during the discharge session and loading them into the car. I cried through the beautiful sunset driving home. I cried as we finally held them in our house. They were all happy tears. After 50 days of feeling a little robbed of a happy birth, this was our day to celebrate and feel like normal parents who had babies. We could finally smile and know that our babies were going to be OK. So for us, October 11th was a much sweeter day than August 22. August 22 we were so scared, but October 11 was the happiest day of our lives - except for June 24, 2000 - Our wedding day, but remembering that day will be another post.