Browsing all posts in "Emotional Impact".

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 [...]

Friends in the NICU

One of the best things we did for ourselves during our stay at the NICU was make friends.  I recall the first time my husband said hello and started chatting with the woman next to us.  At first I was thinking he shouldn’t bother her, but then she chatted back and told us how she [...]

Starting a March for Babies Family Team

While our daughter Addie was in the NICU for 135 days, we struggled a lot with feeling isolated.  Our small support system was great, but most of our friends were far away and those that did live close had small children that were restricted from visiting the hospital due to the H1N1 outbreak. We would [...]

The Story of Jack Matthew

This story was shared by Lindsay, one of our readers. I am writing to share our story of our 24 week (15 ounces) miracle with you…JACK MATTHEW Now a little timeline of our whirlwind before I begin.  Matt and I had our first date in april 2005, engaged 2 weeks later, married 1 year later, [...]

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 [...]