Home From the NICU

Noah came home from the NICU on September 28th! Things have been busy so I haven’t been great about blogging. 🙂 While in the NICU one of the nurses came up to me and said (basically) “You don’t know me but I’ve been reading your blog. I came across it on facebook and then I saw him (Noah) and you and realized it was you guys!” That was pretty awesome 🙂 

Daniel and I thought about keeping our adoption news private for maybe a week after everything was official so we could have time to let it all sink in. We talked about it that day though and both of us knew there were so many people who had been rooting for, praying for, cheering on, and sending good vibes to us that we wanted everyone else to get to enjoy the good news too 🙂 So many people have been through this craziness with us and we’re grateful for all of you, even the ones we don’t know personally like my lovely new friend from the NICU 🙂 Thank you for your messages, comments and sweet conversations 🙂

Some quick updates:
– Noah sees his pediatrician once a week and his home health nurse once a week. It’s nice to have two appointments a week so we can keep a close eye on his health.

– He’ll have weekly OT and PT as well.

– At last week’s pediatrician appointment he weighed 4lb 5oz! 🙂 He’s growing! I think he weighed 4lb 1oz when we brought him home four days earlier.

– Aurelia is LOVING being a big sister. She adjusted (if I can even call it that) immediately, like he had always been here. The only thing we’re working on is being quiet while Noah is sleeping 🙂 He usually wakes easily and Aurelia regularly sings (“sings”?) louder than I can yell. She’s working on it 🙂 She love, love, loves being a big sister 🙂 She wants to help with absolutely everything. She sings songs to Noah everyday, usually trying to calm him when he’s upset 🙂 Aurelia helps do little exercises with him and sings him the “exercise song” (It goes “eck-o-size, eck-o-size, eck-o-size”). She really wants him to get bigger so they can play together 🙂

– Noah is tiny in case you somehow missed that. Very, very tiny. Right now he is about the size of a baby born at 34 weeks, but he was born at 35 weeks, 5 days and is now 10 weeks old. On the preemie growth charts his weight wasn’t even ON the chart when we were discharged, it was down in the table below the chart. I’ll try to post a picture of the growth chart with his sizes on it sometime. He is growing though 🙂 He is making progress 🙂 We think eventually he’ll be a fantastically tall kid, but for now he’s just growing, resting and putting in the hard work of being a tiny baby 🙂

– Daniel and I are super uptight, crazy protective of Noah and people being around him right now, we even have a sign on our door saying no visitors (its a very cute, polite sign). Thankfully everyone has been understanding and no one seems to have been offended yet 🙂 We’re all going to stay semi-quarantined indefinitely. 

Our polite “no visitors” sign 🙂

I’d love to write all about Noah and everything that’s been going on but at the same time we’re trying to maintain his privacy. We don’t want him to grow up and think “jeez you guys didn’t leave out many details. I don’t really want the world knowing all that.” Some of his health issues are temporary but some of them he might deal with forever, so we want to be careful what we put up here. I try to think “okay, if this is an issue when he’s a teenager, is he going to be okay with people knowing”. I know I’m probably over-thinking it with some of these “issues” but oh well 🙂

Anyway, here are some pictures of our tiny Noah 🙂

Snuggling with Daniel. His favorite place by far 🙂

A friend recommended showing his size next to a dollar bill 🙂 He’s about 4lbs 5oz in this picture. At the bottom you can see his G-tube on the left and his apnea monitor wires on the right (there is a lot of medical stuff under his onesie).

Our first day home 🙂 The bruise on his forehead is from his IV going bad at the hospital.