Our Babies

Our Babies
Luke and Claire

"Welcome to Holland"

By Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987. All rights reserved.


I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

One more bottle down!

Well friends, family, and random people that have stumbled onto our blog, Luke sucked down another full bottle today! Besides that, they did a chest X-ray to do a followup from about a week ago. That's when they saw that his chest was "hazy". Doc thought it was some of his air sacs closing up from a lack of oxygen getting to them. He has been breathing much better since! He was above 95% most of the time we were there today so this might be the first step in getting his breathing tube out! Yay Luke!

As for us, we can't wait to get Lukie-poo out of the hospital. It's tiring sitting in a small yellow room without a window or a TV for hours on end. When one of us is holding him the other is on their iPhone playing Words With Friends with each other, our neighbors, friends, and even our nurse Miranda! I (Patrick) also read the news, but it's just a long waiting game. We figure we can do this since he isn't sick, just needing practice.

We realized something today. There are around 40 rooms in the NICU but we hardly see any of the other parents. Surely there are parents that spend their entire day up there. Anyway, our bodies are pretty tired and tense (even after being naked on TV) for these last 12 days.

Melissa's mom went home today, which made us all a little sad. So right now it's just us and the dogs at home. While it's kind of nice having a quiet house, it's going to be nice to have my mom back when Luke gets here.

Well that's it for now. We are going to bed (it's not even 9:30 pm). That's how tired we are!

Noches!

1 comment:

  1. UnknownApril 29, 2010 at 8:05 PM

    Hey guys! I have enjoyed the updates and think about you 3 each and everyday. It's amazing the world of support that you can find among friends on a blog, and the friends that you can also make from the blog. I love the opening line to this blog in particular which shows this as the truth.
    Travis and I may head that way in the future for a day/weekend trip, so we might be giving you a call!
    Keep the updates and pix coming :)

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