Hospital Days [Part 2]

At 2:24am on April 10th, the nurse handed me a pink naked baby. I immediately counted all his fingers and his toes - all his little parts were accounted for. I was shocked (still am) that his little hands looked just like Norm's, amazing. Norm cut the umbilical cord, that looked like a fat white braid. Then we got to hang out for about one hour before they had to take him to the nursery to run blood work and give him antibiotics since my fever had spiked to 102 at delivery and he had a temperature of 100.5.

At 5:00am we were moved to a Mother Baby room and by 6:00am Benjamin was finally with us - IV line in his tiny little hand and all.

Norm holds Benjamin for the very first time:

Very first diaper change for the little one:

When Pablo and my mom came back from sleeping for a few hours, Pablo gave him a blessing:

That afternoon he got his first sponge bath and they brought him back to the room with a heat lamp. He was connected to temperature monitors that confirmed he was able to hold his temperature.

We hang out with baby:

Norm also got to sleep some...

I pretty much stayed awake all day until about 10pm that Friday night. When we turned off the lights to sleep and not even 15 minutes later we heard a faint cry, asking for food.

The next day, Saturday, was quite traumatic for all parties involved. His bilirubin count was borderline low, so he had to be under these lights for 24 hours. He could only come out 30 minutes at a time to eat. The problem was that when he came out, all he'd want to do is snuggle and sleep.

We were given permission to pull him out more often as long as we kept the bottom lights on him. In those cases, we had a little glow worm!

Thankfully we overcame that horrible day and his counts went back down. Aunt Kerrie came to meet him on Sunday morning before we were discharged!

After waiting for blood work and all sorts of other due diligence that are part of being discharged, we got the green light to go home at around 6pm.

Daddy Norm buckled him up in his car seat. I really need to come to terms with this car seat situation - it is the most unpractical, uncomfortable piece of invention pretty much ever.

And off we went to get our new life started!