Six Months

Yesterday, Madeleine and Reid turned six months old based on their corrected age.  This felt like a pretty big deal, as it means that we have now officially entered the realm of solid food, (almost) independent sitting, and teeth (two on the bottom for each of them!).  Even though these things are totally natural and had nothing whatsoever to do with me at all, I still feel so very proud ("My kids have teeth!  They are obviously super genius miracles!!!").

As with the eight month (chronological) milestone, the closer we get to their first birthday (again chronological...they won't "really" be one until March), the more I start to feel amazed - and slightly overwhelmed - by just how far we've come.  It is really quite mind boggling, something I struggle constantly to wrap my head around.  With two little ones, you spend so much time just thinking day-to-day, which I think is a wonderful, healthy thing (nothing like a baby to teach you how to live in the moment!).  But every now and then, I see or hear something and think, "wow, this really has been a long, rough road".

Truth be told, I still struggle with it quite a bit.  I struggle with my memories, the lingering sadness for myself and the babies that I wasn't even sort of able to process while it was happening.  I struggle with the flashbacks that I always feel unprepared for, the forgotten details that always seem to catch me off guard.  I struggle with the stories that I hear of other families that weren't as lucky as ours, and with learning previously-unknown information about the babies' hospital stay that reminds us how close we came to being one of those less-fortunate families ourselves.  And, of course, I struggle with the unknowns ahead of us, the appointments and the therapies that remind us that maybe we aren't doing as well as I like to think we are.

All of these things are still here, still as pressing as ever, six months from their due date and nine months from their birth.  They'll probably be here for a while.  But even so, here we are, with two amazing solid-food-eating, giggling, rolling, babbling, squirming babies, who bring us more joy than I ever thought possible.  And THAT is definitely worth celebrating.

[caption id="attachment_1216" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Reid at two days old, finally home at one month corrected, and showing off his teeth at six months corrected.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1218" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Madeleine at two days old, going home at two weeks corrected, and having a snack at six months corrected.[/caption]

Getting Out, Moving On

This past July, Matt and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary.  Our lovely friend Heather had very generously given us a gift card to a swanky restaurant when the twins were born, and we decided our anniversary would be the perfect time to use it.  Add in a night in an also-swanky hotel, and it was pretty much a new-parents'-first-night-out dream.

We left the twins with my mom for the night, which marked the first time we'd been away from the babies overnight since they came home in April.  I'd heard a few mom friends say that they were so worried to leave their babies for a night out, that they called home multiple times, that the dinner conversation always came back to the baby.  And I'd probably have been that way too if I'd been with Madeleine and Reid since the moment they were born.  But the strange and sad reality is that when your children spend the first three months of their lives in the hospital, you get used to not having them around all the time.  You get used to leaving them behind.

I often think that having an early preemie means that you start out learning to be a mother in the most artificial, unnatural way possible.  It's nobody's fault, of course - it's what needs to happen for your child to survive - but it's a tough adjustment.  You don't hold your baby right away.  You may not even hold your baby for days or weeks after her or she is born (we didn't get to hold Reid for almost two weeks after his birth).  Instead of breastfeeding immediately, you attach yourself to an awkward, gurgling machine for months on end.  You don't dress up your newborn in her going-home outfit and drive off.  She doesn't even wear clothes.  And when she finally does, all those weeks later, you stand in her room and cry at the strangeness of it all.

But the hardest, most abnormal part is the leaving.  The routine you have to follow, where your days consist of visiting your children and then going home at night.  Dropping off frozen breast milk.  Putting on a hospital gown and sitting with your baby against your naked chest for hours until your arms and legs have gone numb.  Falling asleep from the whirring sound of the CPAP machine and the warmth of your little one, and being woken up again by the monitor alarming when his oxygen saturation drops.  Watching the nurses updating each other as the shifts change, and hoping the night nurse will be someone you like, someone who is kind and calm and who you hope will be a good motherly stand-in once you've left for the day.  And then packing up your things and saying goodbye, blocking it out of your mind as you leave that your babies are there alone when they should be going with you.

I found that when it came time to leave the babies for our anniversary - this time on our own terms - I was just as able to block it out as I'd been in the hospital.  It had, for better or worse, become a familiar habit, a well-worn path in my brain.  In fact, our night out, a night that resembled so many wonderful nights out during our pre-baby days, mostly saw us stopping to remind ourselves that yes, we are parents, and yes, all of that really did happen to us.  "Can you believe we have kids?"  "No seriously, we have two kids."  "Our kids are at home right now.  The kids that are ours that we had."

It always astounds me how well our minds can compartmentalize when they need to.  I look back on our experience and think, how on earth did we manage that?  How did we go through that every day for so long?  But the answer is just that we had to.  And seeing how easy we found it to adjust to leaving the babies again, all these months later when our lives look so normal, I realize that no matter how much time passes from those days, no matter how well the babies develop, those early experiences will always be a part of us.  Maybe all we can hope for is that we think about it a little less.

Progress

On Tuesday, the babies and I woke up far too early and headed out to Sick Kids Hospital for Madeleine's usual three-month checkup with her neurosurgeon.  He's seen her four times now since February, and thankfully, we haven't yet had any issues to worry about as far as her shunt function goes.  He asked a few questions about Madeleine's motor development and about potential issues, like having a preference for one side of her body over the other.  No, I told him, no problems yet that we can see.

I was hesitant to ask the question I really wanted to ask, the only question that really matters.  "Do we know anything for sure yet?  Do we know if she's going to be okay?"

He answered in that way that doctors do sometimes, when they don't want to commit to something they can't guarantee.  "It's too early to say," he said.  "But I will say that given the severity of her bleed, I certainly didn't expect her to be doing this well."

It was just what I was hoping for, what we had been dreaming of all of these months.  But at the same time, there was still something nagging at me, still a whirl of anxiety making it's way through my chest.  Of course I'm grateful to hear that Madeleine is doing better than expected - of course!  But even though we've been watching her blow us all always this whole time, even though we had a feeling that she was doing better than she could have been, even though every little new thing she does is a big step in the right direction, I had been trying very hard to not consider the outcome I've always really been hoping for - that maybe nothing will be wrong with her.  I'm hesitant and slightly ashamed to even write those words, to let them slip out of the secret place in the back of my mind I've reserved for the best case scenario.  Best to prepare myself, I figured.  Best not to get my hopes up in case something still goes wrong.  Best to take it a day at a time and not get ahead of myself.

I'm ahead of myself.  I can't help it.  Each time Madeleine impresses her doctors, the part of me that dreams of my girl running and playing and having chatty, articulate conversations gets a little more excited.  The part of me that hopes that she'll grow up and we'll look back and say, "you had hydrocephalus, and look at you know!".  The part of me that hopes that one day we will be the people telling the scared, new preemie mom that their daughter had a grade III intraventricular hemorrhage and you'd never even know it.  And each time nothing goes wrong, that hope gets a little bit stronger.

Of course, I know that if that doesn't happen, if she has developmental impairments that are mild or moderate or crazy severe, if she ends up not being able to walk without help or talk or write or if she needs special help at school, if she has trouble seeing or hearing or whatever it is, it will be more than fine.  She has already shown us that she is perfect and incredible.  I know that even the progress we have made so far is an achievement, that many babies like Madeleine haven't done so well, that we should be counting our blessings for what we have.  I know that no matter what, our lives won't really change that much at all, and motherhood will still by far be the best thing that will ever happen to me, the most incredible, life-changing gift I've ever been given.  I know that health issues and disabilities do not at all change the heart of who a child is.  That they will not change who Madeleine is.

But then there is the part of me who dreams of Madeleine's future and wants her to have only the best, most incredible, easy, beautiful life.  The part of me who doesn't always count her blessings.  The part of me that hopes that we'll beat the odds despite everything we've been through.  That part just might end up pretty disappointed.