Browsing all posts in "Advice".

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 [...]

The Dave Ramsey Call

I found it! I searched and searched for the original call that I referred to in my Preemies & Social Security article a couple weeks ago, because a number of you requested it, and thanks to the help of the Dave Ramsey radio team I was able to get an audio of the complete call. [...]

Preemies & RSV

I was just wondering how many of our preemie babies have actually gotten RSV, either in the NICU (can they get it in the NICU?) or during their first few years of life at home. Some questions I’m curious about are: 1. If your preemie got RSV did you have him under strict quarantine or [...]

Preemies and W-Sitting

As a preemie mom, I feel like I’ve been exposed to a lot of uncommon medical terms.  (A coworker told me her nephew has been diagnosed with craniostynosis and I immediately knew what she was talking about.)  However, the first time one of Addie’s therapists mentioned “W-sitting,” I was a little taken aback. “What sitting?” [...]

Why Do Preemies Have Flat Heads? (Part 2)

Back in February, Afton wrote a great post about premature babies having flat heads.  The official term for “flat head syndrome” is plagiocephaly.  Preemies usually have positional plagiocephaly due to lying in one position for a long period of time during their NICU stay. If you notice that your child has a flat spot on [...]

Making Your Marriage Work in the NICU

Any marriage can and will change with the birth of a new baby, especially when it’s the first child being born to new parents.  When a baby’s arrival doesn’t goes as planned, though—when a child is born with health issues or simply comes too soon—that’s when preserving a marriage takes a lot more work! My [...]

Preserving Memories in the NICU

There’s an old cliché that says, “Hindsight is 20/20.”  Never is that more true than a long NICU stay with a micropreemie!  Most of my regrets revolve around my memory-keeping techniques—and here’s the way I wish I had done things: I would have taken pictures of Adeline every day.  I would have put her next [...]

Support Groups

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently returned to visit the NICU where my preemie lived for over three months.  During my visit I got in contact again with the Parent to Parent organization they had there to provide support for all of the parents in the unit.  It was brought to my [...]