Staying In, Part 1

The day or so before you get to bring your baby home from the NICU, you get the opportunity to "stay in."  When you stay in, they have you stay in a room in the NICU equipped with little more than a couch/bed, a television, and a bathroom.  There is also a place to park to your baby's crib.

When you stay in with your baby, it is really the first time that you get to be a "parent."  You are the one who gets to care for your baby.  You change all the diapers.  You give all the meds.  You do all the entertaining.  You basically do everything you would do at home.  In essence, it's the last bit of home "pre-training" you will get.

For staying in, you can either chose the day shift or the night shift.  We decided to choose the day shift.  That meant that we would be taking care of Nathan all by ourselves from 9am to 6pm on Monday, January 21st.

Unfortunately, the night of the 20th / morning of the 21st saw a huge snowstorm hit the area.  By the time we were ready to leave in the morning, there was over a foot of snow on the ground.  And the roads were not yet plowed.

But in our eagerness (and in retrospect, stupidity) we decided to go ahead and forge our way up to the hospital.  Since the roads were not yet plowed, traffic was extremely slow and snarled.  What is normally a 1-hour-or-so drive turned out to be a 3-hour drive that morning!

There were quite a few slide-offs and there was no clear delineation of lanes on the interstate.  In fact, at one point, what is normally a 5-lane section of freeway only had 4 lanes of traffic going!  Somehow 2 lanes had become one.  And then a couple of miles down the road again, they had somehow once again divided.

At one point, someone from the hospital called to check on us because we were so late.  We told them that we were on our way but stuck in the snow-locked traffic.  Really, I don't know that the thought of NOT going to the hospital for the stay in ever even crossed our mind.  We were excited to have Nathan coming home the next day and didn't want to delay it any.

However, once we were at the normal "half-way" point and had already been on the road for an hour, we thought that it was best to delay Nathan's homecoming a day if the weather was bad again the next day.

We finally arrived at the hospital a couple of hours late, but safe.  Which was a relief to everyone!