As carefully as you plan your life, you must always anticipate the sneaky curveballs that will inevitably be thrown at you. For instance, my beautiful, easy pregnancy was not supposed to end in emergency surgery and premature eviction of my child from his cozy home. The fact that I ever thought I was in control of my pregnancy is completely laughable, but what does a first time mom know? Nothing, apparently.
From my limited understanding (and interest) of baseball, a curveball does not necessarily mean you are going to get a strike. You just have to adjust your swing. Step up to the plate and hit that curveball out of the park. Turn a sneaky change of plans into a home run. Okay, I will stop with the analogies and quit while I am ahead.
Jackson, Colin, and I have officially been in the NICU, or baby boot camp as we call it, for two weeks. Jackson is two weeks old and we are so busy trying to stay on a schedule and do what is best for him at all times we failed to even celebrate. I realized he had hit his two week milestone late in the day and threw together a couple of scrapbook pages together to hang in his suite. That will just have to suffice for now. We will get to celebrating as soon as we can bust out of here and go home. For now, we shall take things an hour at a time.
As I mentioned, we are in baby boot camp. Colin and I have the advantage of one-on-one baby care training with a variety of doctors and nurses. As professionals have told us, NICU parents tend to go home and be more successful at taking care of their baby because of this intense training time. Who else but a NICU parent has doctors, nurses, lactation specialists, feeding specialists, respiratory specialists, and occupational therapists at their disposal 24 hours a day? We are getting used to services that we have yet to figure out how to take home with us when we finally get to leave.
Speaking of leaving, Jackson's neonatologist initiated a plan today to evict us from our cozy little suite in the NICU. It seems he would like us to leave. Doesn't he realize we are not ready yet? We did not have our baby shower. There are several things we still need to acquire to be ready to host a baby at our home. We need to come up with a way to pay a NICU nurse to come live with us one one income. We need an infinite supply of diapers, clothes, pacifiers, and blankets. Who is going to help us get a fancy machine that constantly tells us what his heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and dissolved oxygen levels are? We better get busy!
The plan really just involves us deciding how we want Jackson to feed. There are two extremes:
- Bottle feed with pumped breast milk or formula full time
- Breast feed full time
I have chosen the road in the middle:
- Breast feed four times a day
- Bottle feed four times a day
This means I have to work up to breast feeding four times per day starting now. Once we have established this, we can introduce the bottle. At that point, Colin can take over some of the feedings and be more involved with those special times of intense bonding. This will also allow me more time to rest, even though I will still have to pump every three hours. In the meantime, we are inching towards Jackson living in a crib rather than an isolette (only 3 degrees to go) and getting off his cannula. Once everything comes together, we will get the boot.
So this is it. The home stretch. We have been told from the beginning this is the longest and most drawn out phase. We have to remain patient and let Jackson stay in the driver's seat. After all, he has been in control this whole time anyway. Yes, we are under the complete control of a person who is negative five weeks old.
As I mentioned before, best laid plans often go awry. I am hopeful but I refuse to get my hopes up. I asked the doctor for an estimated number of days remaining, yet I am not marking days off on a calendar. I plan to be diligent about making sure we are doing everything that can be done to ween Jackson off oxygen and his isolette, yet I'm not going to be pushy. I have learned that I can't plan everything going on in my life, especially when it comes to Jackson William Morrison.
*Yawn*
Controlling mommy & daddy's lives is exhausting!
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