Blast to the Past

When I dropped off the girls are Trisha's today, I heard a song on the radio that I hadn't heard in quite a while. Mind you I'm not in the car that often anymore, but this song brought me back to when the girls were in the NICU. Back in those days, I visited the hospital after I worked a half day and then I drove back to the hospital with Ben in the evenings. We listened to the radio a lot. You know how when a song is popular they play it every few hours. Well we would hear our favorite songs about every time we got into the car to either go visit the girls or come home from visiting the girls.

When I heard the song (a death cab for cutie song) this morning, my mind just began rewinding and thinking about all the changes that we had during that time. I had a LOVE HATE relationship with going to the hospital to see the girls. I loved going and actually seeing the girls, but I hated the commute and I hated how we couldn’t be home with the girls. Each and every day they were making changes not always in the direction I wanted them to go but they were always changing.

Back to the song, there were two other songs that Ben I would always turn up when we heard it on the radio. I started looking at the lyrics of the other two songs and this part caught my eye because it kind of described how I was feeling.

Waiting for the end to come
Wishing I had strength to stand
This is not what I had planned
It's out of my control....

I hate when things don’t go according to plan. I remember complaining to Ben on many occasions that "This was not how it was supposed to be." This was not how I envisioned my pregnancy or the birth of my first child/children going down. I complained to him A LOT while I was in the hospital! I know you can hardly believe that I would complain, but boy did I ever ;). Most days were good, but there were some days where I had had enough. He would get a call if I had to go into extended monitoring with the girls (ie, if they had a desat in their heart rates) or if I hadn't felt the move girls in a while. He'd always talk me down out of my worries and tell me that the girls were just fine. He would laugh when I would try to poke my belly to just get them to move so I would know they were okay. Every morning the doctor would ask me if I had felt the girls moving, so I was super paranoid if I didn't feel the girls moving because I was sure something was wrong if I didn't feel the moving. More often than not I just wasn't paying attention because I was working and I was ignoring their movements :).

There were also many good things that happened in the NICU and hospital stay.
I remember getting on an elevator at the NICU and heading down to my car. I saw a lady hurrying to the elevator so I held the door open. When I saw her she got this HUGE smile on her face and asked me how I was doing. She even gave me a big hug and exited the elevator. I had no idea who she was but after a lot of thinking I realized she was one of my nurses when I was in the hospital. I loved when I saw my old nurses!

I remember when the girls got their first "primary nurse". I remember a lady coming in and said she was going shopping. She was trying to find her new primaries and she picked the girls. The girls loved KARLA. Karla would spoil the girls, which I loved. Karla would work the night shift and Eve was always scheduled to eat last, so after Karla would feed Eve Karla would just hold her on her chest. I loved it! I remember when the girls got their first day "primary nurse" Marcia. I remember asking Marcia how she chose the girls as her new primaries. We had never met Marcia. She told us that she chose her primaries by looking to see if the baby had good parents. Who knew when she actually saw us and decided that Ben and I were good parents, but I'm glad she did because Marcia was great! She would laugh at the girls’ antics and she was always excited about the progress that they made. Having Karla and Marcia there with the girls at the hospital made it a lot easier because I knew they cared about the girls’ progress and were caring for them when I wasn’t able to.

I remember the first time I got to hold Eve in my arms. I didn't get to hold Savannah for a few days later because she had just gotten her chest tube put in and was heavily sedated. I remember her cuddling up to me and there was a realization that this baby was mine. I had felt it before, but when you finally get to hold them in your arms and not just touch their head or their stomach there is something special about that moment. A few days later Ben was able to really hold her. I always thought it was funny how they always asked the Mom if they wanted to hold the baby, but they didn't always ask Ben. The nurses caught on quickly that Ben and I both wanted to be able to hold a baby so we soon switched off who would hold whom.

I remember one afternoon I had gone to visit the girls at my normal time and I noticed that they had moved a new baby into the room the girls were in. I was holding Savannah at the time just rocking her and talking to her when the new baby's mother came in with her mother. They went to see their baby and closed the curtains around the crib. It was probably about 45 minutes before they opened the curtains back up and the mother's mother came out. By this time I had moved on and was holding Eve. She looked at me and said "What I nice job you have, where you can go around and hold babies." I smiled at her and told her that indeed that would be a nice job, but both of these babies were mine :).

Sorry for the tangent down memory lane, but that song got me thinking. I’ll post some recent stuff soon but hopefully you enjoyed the blast to the past ☺.