Home Bittersweet Home

Well there is nothing to make a person appreciate her own bed like a five-week sleep in a hospital bed.  We arrived back at the big green house outside of Kerkhoven late Sunday night with a car full of stuff, exhausted.  The house actually looked pretty good when we came in, at least until Jesse unloaded the car. . . then we could no longer see the dining room table, the floor around it, the island, etc.  I wandered around as if I'd never been there before, I think in disbelief that I had actually made it home - at some point I managed to squeak out, "It's a nice house."  And it is.  I went up some stairs for the first time since I left home, and it took longer than I'd like to admit, but that's where the bed is.  And God bless whoever invented pillow-top mattresses and down comforters.  They are amazing. 

Axel stayed with the grandparents one more night, so the house felt very empty and sort of depressing.  We have four children and none of them were home - something a lot of people, myself included, might normally be excited about, but it was actually quite sad.  All of my time in the last couple months has been about producing healthy children, and I had done that but come home empty-handed.  It's kind of an exclusive club, having a baby or babies and not getting to bring them home from the hospital right away.  It's not a feeling I'd wish on anyone!  I think it's probably hard to imagine if you are not a parent, and even if you are, it was way tougher than I even thought it would be.

I had Jesse call the NICU last night to check on the boys.  If I had called I think I would have cried, something I am prone to do lately, especially when missing my babies.  Their feeding amount had already doubled since we left them on Sunday night.  Eero was finishing up under the blue lights.  Magnus, the little champ, had already had his IV taken out, and Rex and Eero would probably lose theirs by this morning.  So they are breathing on their own, and only hooked up to little feeding tubes right now - swallowing is one of the last things to develop in babies and they probably haven't mastered that yet, but the nurse told me they try to start sucking/eating by 34 weeks, which would be next Wednesday already.  They're doing great!

Before we left on Sunday night we got to do a kangaroo hold (I think that's what they said). . . we take our shirts off and hold the babies up against our chests, one at a time.  They snuggled up and the nurses cover them with blankets and we just sit and rock and hold them, our bodies keeping them warm.  It was the greatest hour of my life since we found out we were having triplets.  I can't wait to go back and do it again!

We were going to try to hold out on going back until the weekend, but neither Jesse nor I can stand it anymore so we're heading back tomorrow morning.  There are boarding rooms at the hospital for parents of babies in the NICU, so we'll go back to our hospital sleeping arrangements.  It's pretty much a regular hospital room without the housekeeping and nurses, so it doesn't differ that much from my previous extended stay where the housekeepers never showed up and I had to remind the nurses that I needed care! 

Axel is going to stay with Grandma Mary again.  He is not allowed in the NICU because he is a germy kid under the age of 12.  That was the other sad part of this situation - when he finally came to the hospital to see us after the babies were born, he was not allowed to see them.  He asked us many times if he could, and though he wasn't terribly upset by it, it was hard to tell him he could not meet them yet.

On the way to the metro area we are stopping to look at a bigger vehicle, our most necessary adjustment to being a family of six.  I hope it works out, because it makes me feel like we're closer to bringing our little boys home - we'll have a car that we'll all fit in!