The Early Bird

Born @ 27 weeks 5 days gestation
1 lb 15 oz, 12.9 inches long

Wow. Over 3 months have passed since we brought Wesley home from the hospital, and almost 6 months have passed since he was born. Most importantly, he is healthy and doing very well. Honestly, on most days, I feel like a shell-shocked zombie.

I don't mean to sound negative (and if you read all the way through, you'll see I'm talking about gratitude) but I am not going to sugar-coat parenthood as constant bliss, the way so many people do. I am going to be real and honest and up front. I knew going into this it was going to be hard. Turns out, I was in no way prepared for how hard it has been (premature rupture of the membranes at 27 weeks 5 days, emergency helicopter ride and c-section, baby in the NICU for 10 weeks, and all this even before we brought our baby home and began our sleepless nights...)

I feel like I am catapaulting through my days and nights at record speed, a whirlwind of working, expressing breast milk, caring for Wesley, going to doctor appointments, and stealing 1-2 hours of sleep when I can. As fast as this pace feels, parts of my heart and mind are still caught in the days just after Memorial Day, hanging in slow motion, in small spaces where I'm still trying to figure out exactly what hit us.


Going Home from the Hospital,
38 Weeks,
6 lb 1 oz

 After ten weeks in the hospital, Wesley came home two weeks before his due date. He weighed just over 6 pounds and he was so tiny in his car seat that we rolled up blankets and placed them around his head. I sat in the backseat with him and I have never been so nervous. It seemed like every little bump jarred him. I know he was nervous because he sucked vigorously on his pacifier the whole way home. When we got home he was wide-eyed for several hours. Our little baby had never known any world except the hospital, and all its alarms, and constant poking and prodding.

I recently saw a Facebook conversation in which some friends were discussing their kids, and one person said, “the nights are long but the years go by fast.” I know exactly what he meant. Fatigue and sleep deprivation have been the hallmark of our lives for six months now, with probably another two months to go before Wesley is even capable of sleeping a 4-6 hour stretch.

Every night when we’re up every few hours, I wonder, how long we can do this? People always say, “sleep when baby sleeps.” I just smile, but I want to say, will you come over and load my dishwasher and do my laundry, so I can sleep when baby sleeps?! Our lives seem chaotic. Some of our loved ones simply can't survive the shock. Our plants are dying. We've lost a starfish. Our cat died (she was 16 years old and in declining health for a while). We're constantly losing ground against the dirty dishes and laundry. I can tell that it will be years before my house is dusted or deep-cleaned in any fashion! Anything beyond the basics is simply unattainable right now. (And boy, did I yearn to make and can some apple butter this year...)



5 1/2 Months Actual,
13 Weeks Adjusted,
11 lb 15 oz

 Just when we start to make some progress with sleeping, or just when I start to feel like I am "getting it," everything changes. I felt like we were just out of the colic phase and starting to develop some longer sleep cycles, when suddenly baby Wesley is a drooling, fist-sucking mess. We feel a tooth coming in! I don’t think I’ve slept more than 2 hours in several weeks…and my bizarre dreams have returned. I dreamed that a cat named “The Struggle for Profound Thought” was perching on my neck at night, and that a co-worker was placing life-size, color cardboard figures of us around the building.

But every day Wesley does something new. It has been amazing to watch him transform from a tiny, sleepy, tube-fed noodle in an isolette to an active little baby who wants to interact with his environment. It’s like receiving a gift every day. He smiles responsively, laughs, holds his head up, kicks his legs in the air, grabs objects, and has started trying to roll on his side. He is strong and healthy. His vision exams have been normal (preemies are at risk for an eye condition called retinopathy of prematurity). He is strong-willed. And loud, opinioned, and fiesty at times! I guess this is the strength that got him so far. He weighed 1 pound 15 ounces at birth and almost 6 months later (adjusted age: 13 weeks) he weighs 11 pounds 15 ounces.

I meant to write during the 11 weeks I was home with Wesley, and yet, I didn’t often have a free hand, and when I did, I was too tired.

Born @ 27 weeks 5 days gestation,
7 weeks in the NICU,
3 weeks in a Special Care Nursery

I did manage to write a 1500-word essay called “Liquid Gold,” which I adapted from a previous blog entry called Pumping, Pumping, Pumping) and submitted it to Real Simple magazine’s “when did you first understand the meaning of love” essay contest. This essay is about milk! Breast milk, specifically. About my experience expressing breast milk around-the-clock for almost three months, for my tiny baby who was too weak to eat on his own.

(Protecting my milk supply, by the way, is the most important thing I have ever done. If today was my last day, this is the one thing that I would be the most proud of, the one thing I would never change, and I would do it all over again if I had to.)

I think I wrote most of the milk essay in my head, during many hours in the rocking chair nursing Wesley. Then I managed to type most of it one-handed. When Wesley was that little he needed to either be held or fed (or both) virtually all the time. After the essay deadline, fatigue from sleep deprivation set in, and Wesley's colic intensified and didn’t begin to subside until he was about 7 weeks adjusted age. During that time, everything in my life disappeared except for my daily walks with Wesley, and feeding, holding, soothing, and rocking.

I Just Love His Facial Expressions!


During this week of Thanksgiving, I am filled with gratitude. For me, being a parent is at once the best and the most difficult thing ever. Just when I think I don’t have the strength to continue, Wesley smiles or giggles and everything that I’m worried about just recedes into the background. Perspective. I have gained instant, clear perspective, even during complete chaos.

I always think of the phrase, "this too shall pass." Almost as quickly as a really bad day develops, a new, amazing day takes its place. I try to enjoy the present moment, whatever it may be. Just the other day, we were talking about how quickly 6 months have passed, and Chuck said, "To tell you the truth, I don't even remember how it was before we had Wesley." He couldn't have said it any better.

Perspective

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone


I saw this quote on Facebook this morning and I really like it. This is basically what I was trying to say in my last post, The Ambivalent Parent.

However, sometimes it’s hard to stay positive when you’re retching into your kitchen sink.

I have been eating mostly fruit and toast and eggs for the past four months, it seems. I started feeling better lately so I got a little bit adventurous last night and had some Chinese food. I didn’t feel very well after that…as soon as I woke up this morning I was pretty sure I was going to puke. I ate some toast and a smoothie and felt better for a little while when suddenly I was overcome by nausea and I spewed my smoothie and toast, in a thick purple sludge format, all over my kitchen sink. Eew. It was so intense I had a headache for an hour afterwards, as if I’d strained something. Guess I better go back to my nothingness diet of blandness.

And then there’s the mucous thing. At first I thought it was a cold, but it persisted, without ever really getting worse or better. It’s the worst in the morning when I first wake up. My ears are clogged with fluid. I sneeze and blow my nose constantly. As soon as I get out of bed, the mucous starts running down the back of my throat, triggering my gag reflex, and increasing my nausea.

Smells overwhelm me. In a recent post, I described how thoroughly I cleaned my refrigerator. Last weekend, I was haunted by a nasty, rotten smell emanating from the fridge. The smell tainted everything, even the water from the Brita pitcher tasted like this putrid smell. My husband couldn’t smell it. Remove all the leftovers from the refrigerator, I asked him. He did. Still the smell persisted. A few days later, I noticed a moldy orange in the crisper. I’m pretty sure I could smell that mold long before it was visible.

Today I could smell a strong, musky cologne on a man getting into his car at least twenty feet away from me. Sometimes I walk by offices and I can smell women’s perfume out in the hallway.

Ok, don’t get me wrong…I’m not complaining. I am capturing this experience as honestly as I can. Even the things people don’t talk about. I have a new respect for women. It’s difficult to function when you’re sick for months. It’s hard to go to work and do everything you need to do when you spent the morning puking, you’re constantly hungry and nauseated, and you didn’t sleep well. I am amazed that women want to get pregnant, multiple times over, knowing they’re going to be sick and tired and challenged in so many ways. The outcome must really be worth it!

I have an even deeper respect for women who struggle with infertility. I have written an article (yet unpublished) about a woman who had five miscarriages and a son who died when he was twenty six days old. She eventually had twin boys via a surrogate. Women who are going through infertility treatments like in vitro fertilization endure tremendous emotional and physical pain, including the loss of their children and painful physical challenges such as injecting themselves twice daily with progesterone via a gargantuan needle.

I needed this reminder today: stepping outside yourself often helps put your own challenges in perspective.