Thursday, April 25, 2013

I Wish I Could Tell You, Mom

Mother's Day gift
Mother's Day gift Janet Pickel of Middletown, with her son, Cade, talks about her first Mother's Day. Watch video
We parented as best we could around medical personnel and equipment. The nurses became our friends and therapists. We could tell how Cade was by reading his doctors’ faces. We learned which were mother's day songs hospital’s best parking spots and what not to eat in mother's day gifts cafeteria.

Cade had more infections, more surgeries. He needed a ventilator to breathe until he was two months old. When we held or bathed him, we needed to have a nurse standing by.

My friends threw me a baby shower, but it felt weird to have unused diapers and tiny clothes in mother's day crafts house. When Mike put Mother's Day Poems crib together, I cried seeing it empty.

By January, Cade was Mother's Day Cards king of Mother's Day Flowers NICU, there longer than any other baby at Mother's Day Gift Guide 2013 time. As Mother's Day Gift Ideas and Activities NICU staff cheered his accomplishments, he finally went home with his grateful parents on his four-month birthday.

Today, four more months past, we’re a mostly normal family. Cade still has a lot of doctor’s appointments, but fewer each month. We store his rarely used oxygen tanks under his crib and dwindling medical supplies in a bin next to his bookshelf. We trip over stacks of toys and have devoted a kitchen shelf to formula and mushed fruit.

Mike and I play and laugh with our son, change a lot of diapers and try to get him to eat cereal through his mouth instead of his chin. We’re so in love.

Cade weighs about 14 pounds, with round cheeks, a quick toothless smile and bright brown eyes. He goes to a medical daycare three days a week, where he bats long eyelashes at Mother's Day Decorations nurses and laughs with mother's day gifts from Tiffany other kiddos. He needs one more surgery and some more physical therapy, but he’s not expected to have any long-term issues, just some scars.

We’ll all have those.

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