Wisdom Heart

This will hopefully be a shorter post.
So, we finally got to take Sophia home. It seemed like she was born months earlier, as so much had happened since then. But, now we had to do the newborn baby/first-time parents thing.
As this was not much different than bringing a healthy baby home, I won't spend a great deal of time on it.
Because of the schedule of the NICU and the constant noises and lighting, Sophia was quite confused as far as sleeping went. Now I know that many babies sleep at weird times and it rarely is in congress with the parents schedule. But what I think was unique about Sophia was that she was very upset by silence. She had become so accustomed to light and noise that when it was gone she got scared and cried. So we had to sleep with a lamp on. And we had a small humidifier in our room that emitted enough white noise to keep Sophia pacified.
The sleeping arrangement we decided on was a bedside bassinet. This bassinet attached to the side of our bed, which made it almost like a small extension on the side of our bed.
She was fed every three hours around the clock. Which was a little adjustment. In the NICU, if we were especially tired or preoccupied with other concerns a nurse could feed or change Sophia. We however rarely took advantage of this because it was very fulfilling to feed Sophia and we did it at almost every opportunity.
My wife continued to pump her breasts with the hope her milk might come in without all the stress of the hospital. This unfortunately never really happened and her production was very little. And after a week or so, it became evident that Sophia was going to be formula fed.
We didn't sleep for what seemed like forever. I am sure this is not uncommon with babies in general. But we of course had no idea it would be that bad. Patty's best friend was here from Florida to help out and I am not sure we would have kept our sanity without her assistance. She has two children of her own and her experience was invaluable.
The only other thing that was a challenge for us was Sophia's medications. There were of course many and scheduling and preparing them while trying to manage her sleeping, eating, peeing, and pooping was incredibly challenging.
But soon we got pretty good at all this and a routine was emerging.
We decided it would be a good time to have all our friends and family over to meet Sophia. Throwing a party while also trying to master all this mom and dad stuff shows the degree to which our sleep deprivation had effected our judgment. But, because of the nature of the NICU only a few of our friends and family had even met Sophia, who was now almost 6 weeks old. So we had the party and it was really great. I think we all really needed it and so many of our friends helped with everything that we managed to not go totally mad from its planning and execution.
Thanks for reading Sophia's story. I will write more tomorrow. And like I said in the last post, comments are appreciated.
-Michael