As our twin boys celebrated their birthday this week I continued to reflect on the miracle of their birth and their lives. Bear with me another week (or six) as I share more of their story. Our faith walk is so intimately tied up with the lives of our children. It’s impossible to separate them.
As we shared in The Time of Singing Has Come and In Every Detail, our journey of faith really began just days after experiencing our greatest loss. It continued in earnest as we sat at the feet of Jesus over the following years and read and studied and were mentored and we learned more about the nature and heart of God. About his goodness. About his mercy.
For us, some of those lessons did not come gently. The path to get our boys into the world was bumpy. Their birthday even more so (Getting Real with God: His Perspective). But they were here and they were healthy, and once I was back on my feet it would all be smooth sailing, right? Not so much.
I had been in the hospital for four days before my boys made their arrival. Complications of their birth and a tough recovery meant another six days in the hospital for me and 18 days in the hospital for them. Thankfully they were healthy and simply “feeding and growing” to get a bit bigger.
The first few days after their birth was rough as I was physically recovering as well but the last couple of days before I was discharged were sweet. Nurses were taking care of me and the angels disguised as NICU nurses were taking good care of my boys. I was free to go back and forth from my room to the NICU and hang out with my boys all hours of the day and night and I knew they were being cared for and loved on and I was able to sleep and allow my body to continue to heal.
During this first week, the following also happened:
Derek had his last day at his old job the day our boys were born (he had to call in sick) and he started a new job three days later. So with three-day-old babies and a wife in the hospital he was visiting me in the morning, going to work at a new job and coming back to visit me in the evening. The hospital was about 45 minutes from his new office.
My mom came to visit me and the boys in the hospital every day. One day she brought her 89-year old mom, my nana, with her to see us. They said goodbye as they left. A few hours later, my mom was back in my room. They’d never left the hospital as my nana had collapsed in the parking lot and had spent the day in the ER.
What a week!
The day finally came for the boys to be discharged. I remember the nurses unplugging the boys from all of their leads and giving them to us to put them in their car seats. They could not help us get them situated and they were so tiny it was a feat to figure out how to prop blankets all around them and buckle them in. Then they tested the boys to make sure they were continuing to breathe. Are you kidding me? I don’t think they are ready to come home if that is a possible concern.
And then there was the little issue with the fact that WE HAD NO IDEA WHAT WE WERE DOING. Why were they letting these children out of their care? Did they not know we were frauds? We may have been the “parents” but we had no idea how to do this. I wondered how I would know if they were breathing without all the machines and leads and buzzers and beepers to which we had become accustomed.
They passed their car seat tests and they were released. I sat between them in the backseat as Derek drove. I just looked back and forth from one to the other. I felt so ill-equipped to do this one job that I had prayed to have for years. I felt like we were playing house except these sub-5 pound babies were the real deal.
I held tight to the words of wisdom shared by some experienced mother who told us we would be the expert in our own baby(ies) after the first day or two. She said we’d figure out their needs, how to do all the tasks and in no time we would know their habits, their preferences, their needs.
This did start to happen, but only with the help of two binders labeled with the boys’ names and pages inside where I tracked everything – when they ate, how many minutes or ounces, when I changed them, what it looked like. Seriously, I tracked it all. Yes, I wanted to know my babies, but the reality was I could not remember from one feeding to the next who did what. With more than 16 feedings and diaper changes a day and next to no sleep, we were like walking zombies. We were blessed to have both grandmas on hand daily to help with laundry and bottles and groceries and our dear church family and other friends who brought us meals for weeks. But the nights? We were all alone…and they were long.
It was exhausting and a bit precarious at times, but it was our life. These boys were the answer to prayer and a prophetic word. They depended on us for everything and we depended on God. We needed supernatural strength to get through that season. We finally started to settle in to a little routine…
Until that one day five weeks later when one of my boys spiked a fever…
Recent Comments