Update!
First of all, thanks to everyone for their warm wishes!
Things are going very well. Brainslie and I are now at home. Brainslie is walking slowly but says that she feels a bit better each day. Molly (who shall henceforth be known as CelerySurprise for the purposes of this blog) is doing extremely well. She is out of her incubator and into a cot (expertly swaddled by a loving Brainslie). All IVs and other supporting medical gadgetry has been removed and she is living free and easy. We spent most of today with her in the hospital, learning to feed and change and generally care for her. As much as I would not have wished her to come quite this early, I do appreciate having a much gentler transition into full parenthood than most parents do. I will miss the monitors that display helpful and reassuring statistics on her breathing and heart rate. I now understand why the really complicated baby monitors sell as well as they do.
I have to say that caring for an infant has come more naturally than I thought it would. It reminds me of something that cryptophile told us last week (although it seems like months ago). "The individual tasks of parenting are not themselves particularly complicated," he said (or words to that effect). "It's that you realize that you have absolutely no control of when and where they will happen." I'm only now starting to understand what he meant. Giving a baby a bottle and burping them are not hard. The hard bit is knowing when to do which. Have they stopped sucking because they have gas, or because they're full or tired, or because they're too warm, or what? I foresee a lifetime of such ever-increasingly complicated conundrums.
The good news is that I'm not as worried about it as I was before this happened. It may be the lack of sleep talking, but I feel as though my brain has been rewired. A Wiccan High Priestess once told me that having a baby was a Mystery (with a capital M). It's not that people can't tell you what to expect, she said. It's that the explanation won't make any sense until you go through it yourself. That's what makes it a Mystery. My friends who are parents have all told me how your life changes utterly when you have a child, but in a good way. I didn't really understand what they meant until two days ago. The nurse took my little daughter out of her incubator and placed her onto my chest. I cradled her tiny self against me and felt the warmth of her skin on mine and this vast something crashed over me. All of a sudden I was crying and smiling and felt the world fold in on us. As Peter Beagle once wrote, "I did not know that I was so empty; to be so full." That's how I feel now. It's a good thing.
Things are going very well. Brainslie and I are now at home. Brainslie is walking slowly but says that she feels a bit better each day. Molly (who shall henceforth be known as CelerySurprise for the purposes of this blog) is doing extremely well. She is out of her incubator and into a cot (expertly swaddled by a loving Brainslie). All IVs and other supporting medical gadgetry has been removed and she is living free and easy. We spent most of today with her in the hospital, learning to feed and change and generally care for her. As much as I would not have wished her to come quite this early, I do appreciate having a much gentler transition into full parenthood than most parents do. I will miss the monitors that display helpful and reassuring statistics on her breathing and heart rate. I now understand why the really complicated baby monitors sell as well as they do.
I have to say that caring for an infant has come more naturally than I thought it would. It reminds me of something that cryptophile told us last week (although it seems like months ago). "The individual tasks of parenting are not themselves particularly complicated," he said (or words to that effect). "It's that you realize that you have absolutely no control of when and where they will happen." I'm only now starting to understand what he meant. Giving a baby a bottle and burping them are not hard. The hard bit is knowing when to do which. Have they stopped sucking because they have gas, or because they're full or tired, or because they're too warm, or what? I foresee a lifetime of such ever-increasingly complicated conundrums.
The good news is that I'm not as worried about it as I was before this happened. It may be the lack of sleep talking, but I feel as though my brain has been rewired. A Wiccan High Priestess once told me that having a baby was a Mystery (with a capital M). It's not that people can't tell you what to expect, she said. It's that the explanation won't make any sense until you go through it yourself. That's what makes it a Mystery. My friends who are parents have all told me how your life changes utterly when you have a child, but in a good way. I didn't really understand what they meant until two days ago. The nurse took my little daughter out of her incubator and placed her onto my chest. I cradled her tiny self against me and felt the warmth of her skin on mine and this vast something crashed over me. All of a sudden I was crying and smiling and felt the world fold in on us. As Peter Beagle once wrote, "I did not know that I was so empty; to be so full." That's how I feel now. It's a good thing.