Does your baby qualify for Early Intervention (EI)? Lyons Cub was born weighing 3 lbs and being six weeks early, and he qualified as an asymmetrical IUGR baby and pre-term infant. Strictly speaking, he did not have any huge delays, and his eyes and ears were just fine. However, he did have some gross motor…
When Lyons Cub had his first birthday, I wanted to create something memorable (not for him, but for me, haha 😉 ), especially with regard to his difficult birth and IUGR diagnosis. If you have a baby of whom you don’t know whether he’ll make it, or what the outcome will be, the first year…
Some people might think wearing your own breast milk in resin is kind of gross, but feeding your baby breast milk (regardless of whether you nurse, bottle feed, or tube feed) is one of a kind of a journey and deserves to be celebrated. Just think of all the pain of stiff, engorged breasts, of…
Dear NICU mom, You’ve probably seen them, those beautiful belfies from the breastfeeding mommy cohort, #Tree of Life (to normalize breastfeeding and to show the bond between mommy and baby), but you are stuck in the NICU with a micro-preemie, preemie, IUGR baby, TTTS (twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome) babies, or an otherwise sick and tiny newborn…
Are you nesting yet? I’m glad I started nesting when I was about 4 months pregnant, because Lyons Cub arrived at 8 months (three days after my baby shower), and had I waited until his due date, I wouldn’t have finished in time and wouldn’t have had his nursery ready when he came home from…
Berni was an adventurer, a globetrotter, a fun-loving flea-market enthusiast and patriarchal family father. What he said had to be done. He needed action, and wherever he was, there was plenty of it. I remember that in my childhood and youth, we used to make weekend trips called, “Reise ins Blaue,” and these trips into…
The four most important questions first, in case you are currently considering IVF: Will it hurt? Yes. Will it be emotionally draining? Yes. Will it cost a lot? Yes. Will it be totally worth it? Yes, if it works in the end. Any guarantee? No. My husband and I wished so much for a baby,…
“Is he your grandson?” asked a guy at the Christmas market when I was pushing my son’s stroller along the booths. “Have you never seen a mom over 40?” I thought, dismayed. Not every girl finds her true love in her twenties. I met the love of my life at 38, through my job at…
It was 11 p.m. on January 29th. I was 34+5 weeks pregnant. I had come home from teaching night class from 4-7:30 p.m., had made dinner, jumped into the bathtub, and was drying myself off when I noticed I lost my water. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was from the bath, but it…
What gets to you most is the sound. The beeping of the machines, the alarms when babies have bradycardia (the so-called “bradys”) and when the monitors recording their heart rate and breathing go off, or even worse, when a baby codes. The constant crying and wailing of suffering little human beings, mixed in with the…