Mythical wife and I are currently staying overnight at the NICU right now. No, nothing is wrong with mythical baby, this is just a mandatory pre-requisite that parents of NICU babies are required to do at this hospital before babies are allowed to go home. So ultimately, this is very much a good thing, and one of the last bullet points we have to check off before our baby is actually going to be coming home.
When my daughter was first admitted into the NICU, one of the more frustrating things was that we couldn’t get anything remotely close to a concrete timeline of how long to expect her to be here; after all, every single baby is different, and I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to give false hopes or expectations to anxious parents, but it didn’t change the fact that we had no real ideas of how long she was going to be in the NICU, instead of at home, giving mythical wife and I a semblance of actually beginning to feel like real parents.
At one point, we were told 10-14 days for a baby as premature as ours was, and then another doctor came along and said that she might possibly be here as long as she was early, which for us was a little over five weeks. During one of the daily visits, one nurse predicted “maybe one to three more weeks,” leaving me feeling drained and dejected.
But it doesn’t matter anymore, because after 16 days, our baby is on the cusp of heading home, with our household becoming complete, and my family all existing under the same roof. At this point, it’s almost feeling like a dream is coming true, because the sense of time during these last few weeks was definitely distorted, and especially with the way the world has become so warped and weird due to the whole coronavirus thing going on, literally changing the way America is running currently.