1st birthday countdown - devin's 3rd month...

i think devin's 3rd month of life was the best month of my life! he finally came home from the NICU after 79 days on 9/9/09! he was 2.5 months old when he came home but was only 37 weeks 6 days old at the same time! the fact that he came home before his original due date and of course the fact that he was perfectly healthy and didn't require any oxygen or monitors was just so satisfying for me. he weighed 7 lbs.at discharge, which was also pretty impressive. he really proved so many drs. and nurses wrong and amazed his dad and i. the day he came home was a busy one. we had "roomed in" the night before. this is when preemie parents spend a night in a hospital room with their child alone. we had to prove we were capable of taking care of our own kid. in many instances i think this is a great thing, but in some, its just degrading. devin didn't have any special equipment or anything we needed to learn and get used to, so it was just an uncomfortable situation. needless to say, the next night when he was home with us was totally different so i don't really see a point to the whole rooming in thing even though we loved spending alone time with devin, it just wasn't fun. nurses were bothering us for silly things all night and it was a really crappy room. so the morning he was being discharged was a loooong one. we had to sign a bunch of stuff and bring in proof that we had made appointments for his first drs. appointments after discharge. we had to wait for a pharmacist to come and explain how to administer medications, we had to watch a demonstration of how to mix formula in pumped breast milk for added calories and so much more that i cant remember!

this is one of his last NICU pictures. since we never got to get one of those newborn hospital pictures, this is the one i consider ours ;)

i finally got to dress my little one in his going home outfit and the nurse stripped him of all his last monitor wires! we finally had a cordless baby! i picked him up and stepped out of his little cubicle into the hall i think i almost died! it felt so weird/scary/wonderful. hospital policy was to wheel the moms out of the NICU in a wheelchair and i honestly couldn't have been happier about that rule. i felt like all the moms i had been watching for the last 11 weeks. i would see them sitting in the lobby waiting for their husbands to pull the car around. they would be holding their healthy baby and most likely had never seen the NICU- while i was going up to watch my son grow in a plastic box. man, i hated those women for the longest time, but today, i WAS one! the only difference was that i was sitting next to about 6 HUGE bags of pumped breast milk stored in little bottles that had been kept in the NICU freezer. oh well, to me, it felt normal.

driving home was crazy, fabian was driving and i was in the backseat with devin. every little thing made us jump and i was so nervous about devin not being hooked up to any kind of machine. for all his life we had relied on a screen to let us know he was safe and we didn't have that anymore! i dont know how i got over that! but i did... and quick ;)

finally home!

first feeding at home!

fraggle meeting devin for the first time. (devin is yawning not screaming in agony despite what it looks like). i think fraggle was like "hey! that was my bed you made for me pulled up next to your bed! why is there something in it now?"

this is the picture i stared at constantly while i was in the hospital. this is what i was waiting for the whole time!

here's what out freezer looked like... yeah, we literally had to duct tape it shut.

the day after he came home we ventured out for the first time to his first pediatrician appointment. the office was way too far away and the dr. was really weird. we didn't go back again but here are some pictures of how cute devin looked all ready to go!

we finally felt like a normal family. we had our healthy baby, home and happy. he liked his swing and liked to cuddle in his boppy and nap for a good part of each day. he was just a normal newborn and it was great! thats how i remember it at least. i know it was stressful and we didn't get much sleep but in my mom brain, i remember it as being a wonderful time. i think we're programmed that way so we force ourselves to make more babies!

devin really was easy going in those days. i would put on soft music and he would just relax and do brand new baby stuff. i was pumping every 3 hours and we kept him on a 3 hour schedule which included a diaper change, breastfeeding, then a bottle as well so that was pretty rough. pumping was just horrible but i did it for 7 months and im pretty proud of that! like i said, devin was laid back and just slept alot. we gave him tummy time a few times a day and he seemed to like looking at little toys placed close to him. he liked bath time also. even with all the new activities going on in my life it seems like i had alot of free time those days! devin was just a joy and getting to know him at home was just wonderful. it felt even more special because we had all worked so hard to get to  this point!