1st birthday countdown - devin's 4th month...

devin's 4th month began with his original due date! he was due on september 24th 2009. all preemie mamas have mixed emotions when their child's due date rolls around and up until that day i really had no idea how i would feel. i ended up feeling happy and excited. i didn't have bitter feelings at all. im sure i would have felt much, much differently if devin was still in the NICU. thankfully he had been home with us for 2 weeks and we were already settling into a routine. for me, the day felt like a fresh start. i could finally stop thinking devin should still be growing inside me! this thought had haunted me his whole life up until that day. i finally had a "newborn" and i felt like i could put all the scary times we had gone through together behind us. to celebrate and capture the moment, my mom came over and we had a photo shoot. she was using her old 35mm camera that used to take great pictures. key word is used to... apparently the flash battery was weak and she may have been a little rusty as well and most of the would be adorable pictures came out dark and blurry. we did manage to get a few good ones though...

i think of this month as the month of the bouncey seat. devin loved his bouncey. he spent most of his time in there and by the end of the month, had taken to sleeping during the night in there too. we had issues with him sleeping flat on his back. the NICU had the head of his bed elevated for the entire time he was there. they did this in hopes of easing reflux symptoms which he never had. he never suffered from relux but i guess because so many babies do, they were trying to help. it really didn't help anything though and we were left to suffer the consequences at home. he was much more comfortable in an elevated position so we had him in the boppy at first, then the bouncy seat. both of them made me nervous because they are not for sleeping unsupervised. we found a solution the next month that i will talk about tomorrow. but basically, this whole month devin was in the bouncey seat. i dont know what we would have done without it.

he was still an easy going lovable little nugget and we loved getting to know him and catering to his every whim! i was getting used to life as a stay at home mom, i wasnt getting much sleep of course and fabian had gotten back into the swing of things at work. he didn't have nearly as many dr. appointments as i thought he would, just about 2 a month for the first few months. not bad at all. since he still slept most of the day, i spent alot of my time on babycenter.com talking to other moms of preemies who were going through just about the same stuff i was. it was a lifesaver at the time. we were all a little over paranoid about our newly non NICUized babes and it was nice to have some people to bring you back down to reality when you needed it ;) i really cant remember anything specific happening that was out of the ordinary this month so this will be a post with a bunch of pictures. devin got chubbier and cuter by the day, what a sweet, sweet boy!

  

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!

1st birthday countdown - devin's 2nd month...

devin's second month was much better by far than his first. things were looking up and devin began putting on weight steadily. i visited him twice a day for 3 hours or more each time. it was so difficult to just sit there and watch him through plastic. he slept for 90% of the day or more. he was still supposed to be inside of me and it was just insane to watch a plastic box and wires and tubes finish the gestational process for me. i settled into feeling ok about that fact. i wasn't overly angry about our new situation, although i did have my days. after the first month i just realized this was how it is, lets just go with it and try to make it bearable. i started bringing sweet comfort things in for devin. a stuffed lamb that was mine as a baby, soft blankets and part of his crib bedding to cover his isolette. it made me feel better and i like to think it comforted him as well. i would carry small pieces of cloth or washcloths in my shirt and bring them in to let him sleep on. babies, even tiny preemies can smell their mother very well.

i finally felt comfortable enough for friends to visit :)

by the end of the second month i got a call while i was away from the hospital. i panicked when i saw the number because its usually not good to get a call from the NICU. they told me that devin was being moved upstairs to the nursery. he didn't need to be in intensive care anymore! they needed the space for babies who did. i rushed to the hospital to check out devin's new pad and i felt like singing the alladin song "a whole new world"! it was wonderful! the babies had their own little cubicle type rooms with a nice rocker and a dresser type thing. they were spread out from each other and it was such a laid back atmosphere! downstairs was basically an open room full of alarms and critically ill babies with nurses rushing around all over. i took a deep breath that day. it felt great! after a week or so the big day came... devin was moved to a big boy crib! he needed to be able to maintain his own body temperature and he did great at it! so he got to keep his new open crib and we were able to take care of him easily and gaze upon our boy without squinting through plastic!

we were able to start offering him the bottle and i was able to let him practice breastfeeding as well. we would weigh him on a very precise digital scale before he breast fed and after to see how many ounces he took. this is his first bottle experience ever- i cant remember how many mls. he took exactly, i think something like 10! that is such a tiny amount but it was actually very good!

meanwhile, at home we were setting up his nursery. something i definitely didn't have done before being admitted at 22weeks! the only thing we had gotten actually was the wooden letters you can see on the dresser. fabian and i had painted them right before everything happened. it felt nice to know his room was ready and waiting for him!

so by the end of his second month of life devin was doing quite well. just learning to eat and putting on weight. he was still on oxygen but that was about it. he started getting just a tiny bit "chubby" (at least to us). i could'nt wait to get my boy home but knew he had a bit more of a journey to get there. more to come tomorrow ;)