An Unexpected Party

The unexpected party in question is my son, who I shall call Grunty McPiglet, or Grunts for short. And maybe I should change the title of this post to "The Expected but Very Premature Party." My husband and I planned for the arrival of our baby and expected him on or around his due date of February 10, 2018. If some babies arrive fashionably late, then Grunts arrived awkwardly early...you know how you don't want to be too late to an event, but you overestimate the time it takes to get there, and then you're an hour early so you can either go inside and hover near the host while they're getting ready, or hide in your car until it's socially acceptable to show up? Grunts chose not to wait in the car.

There are three types of preterm birth: extremely preterm (babies who arrive earlier than 28 weeks), very preterm (babies who arrive between 28 and 32 weeks), and moderate to late preterm (babies who arrive between 32 and 37 weeks). Grunts was a very preterm baby at 29 weeks 2 days, and this is just one of the many factoids that I learned during our time in the NICU. When I was pregnant, I knew just enough about the dangers of preterm labor to worry incessantly about it (and, it turns out, rightly so). But deep down I thought it would never happen to me, so I knew very little about what follows after preterm labor.

And then I became a statistic. I became the 1 woman out of 10  in the U.S. to give birth prematurely. And now I know more than I ever wanted to know about premature birth and babies. I learned many more facts, and gained so much experience; experience that I felt I needed to share in this blog. First disclaimer: I expect that many of my experiences will not be terribly original and can be found in other blogs or forums, so in those cases, this exists mostly as an outlet for my own emotions and anxieties.  (And sometimes just for pure narcissism.) But I also hope I can be of some help to others who are going through or have gone through the same thing.

*Second disclaimer: I am very sleep deprived and so please forgive the occasional misspelling, grammar mistake, or complete lack of coherent thought.

*Third disclaimer: I am, as you have guessed, one of the main caregivers of a very small person, and this person loudly demands a large portion of my time, so this blog may not be updated in a timely fashion.

*Fourth disclaimer: I've already forgotten what this disclaimer is (please see second disclaimer).

*Fifth disclaimer: I feel weird about publishing pictures of my son for the general public to see, so please accept these drawings instead:

I promise, Grunts doesn't look like a young Hannibal Lecter; I'm just really, really bad at drawing people.