Today was a bittersweet day. Our little baby is already a week old and making progress towards getting out of the NICU. But our little Eli is still in the NICU. We spend so much of our day just watching him on the webcam wishing he could be in our arms, but we have to resume normalcy. That's what's the hardest. Pretending that our lives are returning to normal when the one thing you've looked forward to more than anything is still just out of reach.
This morning we had a great session with Eli's speech therapist and we are starting to make progress on him taking a bottle. He can't leave until he has an entire 24 hours of bottle feeding, though, and its so humbling. It's something that seems so simple to us, yet he still just cant quite get the hang of it. Since he still is having trouble feeding, he still has an IV for nutrition. Because he has an IV, we're not allowed to pick up our son. We can hold him, sure, but only after we get a nurse and she hands him to us.
Tonight we had a class in the NICU on taking babies home and it was so hard to focus. The nurses have told us time and time again that Eli is in charge, and he will determine when he gets to come home. All we could think about in class was the day when we finally get to bring him home, knowing that it could still realistically be weeks away.
We have SO much to be thankful for and we are constantly surrounded by babies so much worse off than ours, but that doesn't make it any easier. We just want our little Eli home.
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