Saturday, February 07, 2009

A (Belatedly Reported!) Groundhog Day Surprise!

And so it happened—unexpectedly, surprisingly, and in a way not at all planned by Mommy and Daddy: our boys, Henry and Eli, were born on Groundhog Day, 2009, via a caesarean section. Though it happened a couple of months early, they were healthy, a good weight, and were soon breathing on their own. I followed them as they were being whisked away to the NICU after the delivery.

Mommy wasn’t doing as well—or so we would soon learn. She had symptoms of something called pre-eclampsia (or similar syndrome, HELP), and would have been in even more serious trouble had she not had the boys either that day or very soon thereafter. She ended up in ICU herself for the first two and a half days. Thankfully, on the third day her symptoms began to abate. Now she is in maternity and nearer to the boys.

So it’s been a crazy week. I’ve been back and forth between the hospital, my in-laws (who live closer to the hospital than us), and our house. It’s been a strange but wonderful time, being able to finally meet the little ones who’ve been housed in their mother’s womb for the last seven months. It’s almost unreal, in a way. It takes time to adjust to this reality—to the notion of having two new children in your life. I mean, even though we’ve been expecting them, and have gone through it with our daughter before, only once they’ve entered into our world physically and we can see and hold them does it seem like a more concrete reality.

The journey, of course, has just begun for us. And in fact since they’re in NICU and will be probably for four or five weeks, it feels like, in some sense, the journey is postponed. Only once they’re actually home with us and we’re together—all together—as a family will it feel like we can truly begin our joint journey. But all good things come in time, and we’ll just have to be patient.

There’s no way I can imagine what lies ahead—the role of parenting has the biggest learning curve of any vocation, profession, or relationship. It’s at times exciting, scary, worrisome, joyous, and wondrous. Sometimes it’s all these things at once, like that oldest of human moments when you see your kids come out of the womb (through c-section or otherwise!).

So that has been our week: unplanned like much of life, but still, in the end, very good. It’s hard to say whether having two more kids will result in more blogging or less, but one thing is certain: whether or not I blog more, I will definitely have more to blog about!

3 comments:

RebelAngel said...

Super Duper Congratulations!

GiraffeMSW said...

BIG Congrats to the whole family!

~~Gir from Aquamaniacs

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