Home

Home is a name,

a word,

it is a strong one;

stronger than magician ever spoke,

or spirit ever answered to,

in the strongest conjuration.  

                               ---Charles Dickens

After 77 days of waiting for home, Daddy brought you through the door three years ago today.

Happy Coming Home Day, my little man.

The After

After being born weighing 2 lbs. 10 oz,

after two cerebral hemorrhages,

after weeks on a ventilator,

after transfusions and procedures and tests and the endless beep, beep, beep of monitors,

after 71 long days in the NICU...

my little Baby A came home, three years ago today.

Amid all the chaos of life as it stands, there is not a day that goes by that I do not shudder at the thought of Before,

blink in amazement that we made it to After

and count myself lucky that we have a "Coming Home Day" to celebrate at all.

P.S. Could there be a better shirt??

Issues

McKenna is plugging away in physical therapy, well not really plugging away, the girl barely moves a muscle but we are taking her every week just to kid ourselves that she is actually getting something out of it.

So today she resumed her usual, I'm not doing a thing here stance and the therapist decided we were going to push her limits a bit.  Mark went with her and I stayed with the boys and as we rounded the corner for our millionth lap around the building I saw McKenna heading down the hall on her little therapy bike crying her eyes out while pedaling.  Now, the rational part of me knows that sooner or later the girl does have to do some work and the therapists push-her-a-bit strategy is necessary but the irrational Mommy of the 2lb. 10oz. preemie who spent the first three months of her life crying in a NICU incubator wanted to give the physical therapist a little push of her own, take that stupid bike helmet off, unstrap her feet from the pedals and head out the door, never to return to that awful place again.

So I'm thinking I have issues (if you know me in real life or have been following me for long I'm sure you are laughing at the fact I'm saying this like it is a new thing) but really, I like her physical therapist and I know she wants the best for McKenna and I know McKenna needs to get stronger, but the minute I hear that little girl crying I flash right back to the days and days and days I spent helplessly watching her fight for her life in the NICU and I start having Ally McBeal-like visions of what should happen to whoever is making her cry.  (I hope the one person who watched that show besides me is reading this so 1 someone gets my visual.)

Ms. McKenna's first home

I'm not sure what the point of my ramblings are today other than that there are a lot of levels to being a mom.  Whether your kids are sick or healthy or preemies or angels, raising kids is not for the faint of heart or for the mildly delusional.

I am going to have to get myself and my case of post traumatic stress disorder together.

Either that or just go back to school to be a physical and occupational therapist, teacher and pediatrician so that I can get my kids through their first 18 years my way :)

No one told me this either

We are moving.

Moving day is one day away and if you walked into our house right now you would never know we are going anywhere.

I have found another aspect of losing a baby that know one told me about.

Packing is paralyzing.

Every time I open a closet or drawer I stumble upon one more Hadley thing and I don't know what to do with it so I stop and try to start again somewhere else.

A year or so after we lost her I was able to fumble through her NICU items and fold up her unworn pink.  I put everything in a pretty box and put it up in our closet.  I cannot look in there often but I never forget it is there.

What I forgot about was the hidden pieces of grief.

I forgot about the social security card under my socks that had the audacity of showing up in our mailbox with the others and the "you can make it a little longer" note written by a dear friend of my mom's while I was still pregnant, hiding under my sweaters, holding beautiful thoughts of all I would look forward to in my life with triplets, and the cards and vases and dried flowers from her memorial, all more than I could bare to look at on a daily basis.

I had even forgotten about the bracelet.

When you have a baby in the NICU you get a hospital bracelet to wear that matches theirs.  You wear it until your baby comes home to identify you as the parent.

Mark and I had three.  As each baby was born we looked at each other and laughed in amazement as the nurses put on one after the other after the other.  We were in awe of our arms full.

After a few days of wear we each needed one less but I never took mine off.  I wore it until the ink started to fade and then carefully removed it because I was afraid to lose one more detail of her life.

While packing up my drawers today it slipped right into my hand along with grief too heavy to carry and I was useless once again.

I don't know how to pack up my daughter and the life she never had.  I don't know what to do with the memories collected on her shelf or her ashes or the clothes she did not wear.  A cardboard box falls entirely short.

I'm not sad to leave this house because all of the important things are coming with me.

I'm sad to do one more thing without her,
to go one more place without my whole family,
to keep on going with pain that is easier to put in a drawer than to face.

There is no guidebook for living after losing a baby, no section on how to pack your child's ashes, so I am learning I have to write my own...

And as this chapter begins I have decided what to write.

I will bring her to her new home just as I brought her to her first.

I will carry her.

The one we missed

A friend of mine has triplets just a few months older than mine and while taking my daily scroll through face.book I noticed she had posted a great look back at pictures of their Halloweens thus far.  I looked through her pictures, mentally checking off what my kids had been each year, and wondered why I was one year of costumes short.

And the moment I remembered I wondered how in the world I could have forgotten.

I'm pretty sure that when your children are in the NICU you are in some type of time warp in which you don't really remember anything other than what kind of day they are having and if it has brought them  closer to or further from coming home.  The fact that the world was still turning outside and that holidays were coming and going was always a shock to me.   I remember heading to their sides at the end of October as I did each day and being caught off guard by the little orange pumpkins taped to their isolettes.  Halloween was our first official holiday in the NICU.

I hated it.

I did not like that someone else decorated my babies' isolettes and that I could not go buy tiny little Halloween costumes.  Nevermind the fact that I had just lost one of my daughters and was still waiting for the day that my little McKenna would even be healthy enough to hold.

But when the nurse took out this bright orange hat, knitted by one of the hospital volunteers, she made my day.  She handed my 2 lb. little man to me and I covered up his shiny bald head and took his picture with my phone because it was all I had (darn it!) and held him for as long as his little body could handle it.

And this was our only Halloween that wasn't.

Watching them now, their faces bursting with excitement of the impending sugar-filled day, you would never know that they had skipped a beat, or a Halloween.

Tonight I dusted off our box of NICU memories and showed Parker his first Halloween costume.  As he held it my mind flashed back to how fragile he truly was and I was reminded that my tiny trick-or-treater is a big, huge miracle.

Parker and his hat and McKenna holding the bow that was in her hair that day

One last visit

Today we went for our NICU follow up with the developmental clinic at the hospital where the triplets were born. The kids' growth and development are great and they were very impressed with how smart they are.  We have been officially discharged from their developmental clinic and it feels great to know that my little survivors beat the odds.

I, however, pratically had a nervous breakdown going to their appointment.  We have not been back to that hospital since their last developmental check up over a year ago and I have a complete love/hate relationship with the place. 

I hate it because it is the place where Hadley died. 
I love it because it is the place where Hadley lived. 

While we were there today I had visions of myself coming back there for years and years to come just to hang on to the only place where she ever lived outside of me.  We took the kids up to the NICU floor so they could peak in the window and someone opened the door and I was consumed by the NICU smell that surrounded us for so many weeks.

I want to go back again and go inside and just sit there and listen to the sounds and remember our time there but I also never want to go back again and hear any of it and remember the awful day our lives changed.  It is so conflicting to have the place where your children began their lives also be the place where one of your children never left.

I am reading the book "I Will Carry You" by Angie Smith, a woman who chose to carry her daughter to term despite being told that she would not survive to her birth, and I have to say I am not in the place where she is on her journey but I am trying to get there.  One thing she talks about over and over is being grateful for the time she did have with her daughter and not getting lost in the grief of her death.  I am trying so hard to do this.

I am so lucky to have had the experience of carrying triplets and am so lucky to have carried Hadley for 28 precious weeks and to have gotten the chance to meet her and hold her, even though the first time was also the last.

I remember the day after they were born being in the NICU with Mark and going from baby to baby to baby, getting updates from each of their nurses and feeling completely, happily overwhelmed by the fact that we had just had three babies at once.  We were giddy with the excitement of our new babies but didn't get to live in that moment very long.  I keep trying to hang onto that feeling because we were blessed with three babies and I want to have good memories of the place that brought them into the world.

So today, we made good memories there.  We took our little survivors up to the place they spent the first three months of their lives.  We talked about how far they had come to anyone in the hall who caught onto the fact that they had once called the place home, we visited my favorite nurse who took care of me during my 10 week stay before the babies came, we showed them incubators and just let them roam the place.

Today was a good day at the "baby hospital", as the kids called it, and I was so grateful to carry Hadley's memory with me as we walked out the door one last time.

Mark and the kids looking in the NICU window

The kids, on the other side of that window, two and half years ago

14 months ago...

So last night I started watching NICU videos, most of them I have never seen. That time was such a blur and it has taken me a long time to even be able to go back and reflect on the long journey we spent there. I came across this video from Thanksgiving last year and it just amazed me that the two babies in this video are the same one-year-olds running around my house right now. Many people didn't see the kids in the NICU so this video is a glimpse at life about a month and a half after they were born. By this time they had doubled their weights since birth, weaned off the ventilators and lost their iv's. So even though they look so tiny and fragile this is nothing compared to where they started. Amazing, amazing, amazing...