323 Days

   Three hundred and twenty-three is a pretty big number, but it is especially big and important for us. That is how many days Baby Emma was in the Winnie Palmer NICU in Orlando due to having severe tracheobronchomalacia (weak and floppy airways), with 73 of those days being in the CS Mott's PICU in Ann Arbor, Michigan, before being able to come home with us. She was born on Monday, June 12th at 12:51pm and finally came home at almost the same time on Monday, April 30th, 2018.
   I kind of consider her being in the hospital for one day shy of an entire year because it was another Monday, May 1st, 2017, when I was 31 weeks pregnant, that the doctors saw that "something was wrong" and she was measuring five weeks too small. That is where Emma's blog begins, and I had to remain on bed rest for the remainder of my pregnancy. I had to go to Winnie Palmer twice a week for ultrasounds with MFM (Maternal Fetal Medicine) for those six weeks. But all of that is way in the past now, and even though I sometimes still get very emotional telling people how I was told at 34 weeks pregnant that Emma would "not be compatible with life", she beat through so many of the doctors' expectations. She is the perfect combination of princess and warrior! ;)

  Flashback to 323 days ago ~ Emma greeted us in the morning with big smiles, super ready for this day to finally come home to the bedroom we had set up and decorated for her arrival, months before she was born. I don't remember what time we got to the hospital, maybe around 9am, but I remember being told that when the parents are there, everyone tries to hurry up the discharge process. We had made a cap, gown, and tiny diploma for her and I got a video of me singing the graduation music. Before we left I even asked Nurse Kim to take a picture of me ripping off my pink NICU band, something we were required to wear at all times while Emma was in the hospital. They were newer bands as we got updated ones about five minutes after we got back from Mott's Children Hospital in Ann Arbor on February 21st, 2018.

   I was so shocked thinking that I hadn't posted any of her NICU Graduation photos on her blog yet (I do have a couple photo shoots we've done from last year that I never posted!) but I just found them where you can go back and view those on her Halloween post: 6 Months at Home. These two pictures above were not in that previous post. 

   We got to say goodbye and give hugs to so many friendly faces we got to know over our time in the NICU: doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, other therapists (physical, occupational, music, and speech). One person who wasn't there that day was Doctor Lipman, the British doctor who Emma had half of the time, along with Doctor Hardy who was at her birth. He was on a vacation, I believe, and didn't get back until the following day. But we didn't want to wait an extra day for her to come home. After 323 days of waiting, and crying, and non-stop praying, we were definitely allowing ourselves to be "greedy"!! ;)