The Longest Days of Our Lives

Suffice it to say that yesterday was a good day. After what seemed like hours of just waiting around, wasting time, waiting some more, we finally got to take our son home. Christopher Madison Coote is finally home. You've probably guessed by now that I really do love my son's name. It has such a nice ring to it, not to mention that it's a name that his little big feet can grow into. CMC spent a total of two days in NICU. I knew the doctors couldn't keep him. He progressed as I expected. You can call it what you like but I know my God and I know my son. I carried him inside me for nine months. God taught me some very valuable lessons in faith during those months.

Even when I look back now on those moments when they pulled him out of me and put him covered in the "birth muck" on me...he was this purple color and wasn't breathing. I kept thinking, he looks so gross, can they clean him up and fix that long head of his. You could see the midwife going into emergency mode and everyone quickly moving around taking care of him. I took one look at his father who had that look on his face where his usual composure cracked and he started crying. My heart cried for my husband but not my son. They were giving him oxygen and rubbing him. I heard them vaguely say he's turning pink. My mother had begun to get hysterical at this point. And I kept thinking, he's my son. He'll be fine. Oddly enough that certainty never left me until I brought him last night. Then started the whole new parent phobia of how will I sleep, what if something goes wrong when I'm not awake to watch him.

We took these pictures in NICU on Monday. I left, fully expecting to take my son home. I said as much to the nurses and the doctors. NICU does a great service, and they took great care of my son while he was there. But I always knew he didn't need to be in there. It was a milestone in his life, a short one. Thanks to his sojourn in NICU, he can say he was born in Brooklyn and lived there the first few days of his life! Right now, by the grace of God, he's lying in his co-sleeper, next to me as I type this, in his mother's old room at his grandparents' house. On that note, I'm going to take a nap because my greedy little boy has drank me dry!