Browsing all posts in September, 2010.

Dreams about Preemies

I had a dream a couple of nights ago that I had a preemie baby and that she wasn’t responding to me in any way and didn’t cry when she was hungry so I kept forgetting to feed her.  She was about as tiny as my 12 oz 21-weeker, but I was cradling her in [...]

A Day in the Life

What is a typical day like in the life of a preemie mom? I was just thinking that it would be interesting to share our different experiences. Let’s start with a day during our preemie’s NICU stay. I’ll take a day out of my own experience, about 2 months into my daughter’s NICU stay, during [...]

Being Quarantined During the Holidays

Roxy came home on November 11, 2009.  Two weeks before Thanksgiving. Our hospital had placed strict rules on visitors to the NICU and Neonatal Nursery during Roxy’s last two months because the flu epidemic had gotten so bad in our area.  Only parents and biological grandparents were allowed to visit during October and the beginning [...]

Preemie Halloween Costumes

In 2008, our 26 week preemie was released from the NICU a week before Halloween.  We had been so consumed by her issues (weight gain and bottle-feeding) in the hospital, we hadn’t given the holiday any thought. Since Addie was quarantined during RSV season, we had no place to take her for Halloween, but I [...]

Sharing Your Child’s Progress

The moment our daughter was born 14 weeks early, we were thrust into a flurry of decisions to be made.  Who would travel with her to the children’s hospital, who would stay with me in the maternity ward, who would contact our bosses and HR departments, and so on. Immediately, the news started to be [...]

Were you prepared?

So, I’m reading The Preemie Primer, by Jennifer Gunter, MD, and the book starts out with some general information about prematurity, descriptions of the causes of prematurity, and many statistics about rates of survival and other things.  I’m not very far into it yet, but I was imagining parents of preemies picking the book up [...]

Music Therapy for your Preemie

Our NICU experience came with a lot of “Boy, I wish I had known that earlier…” moments.  Music therapy falls into that category! We were told about our hospital’s music therapy program a few months after our daughter was born.  The therapy team was a group of musicians who traveled around the hospital, playing music [...]