Prematurity Awareness Month- Learning to Celebrate

Heath and I learned early on that celebrating the positives, the achievements, and the victories was going to be our way to cope.  As NICU parents we were celebrating many things that parents often take for granted.

We celebrated making it to 24 weeks with YNHH clam chowder

We celebrated Virginia's PDA closing by kangarooing with her for the first time

We celebrated the first day that she got to wear clothes

 We REALLY celebrated when she came off the ventilator for good.

We celebrated the day that she went into a "big girl" crib, which meant that we could pick her up and snuggle her any time we wanted.  

We celebrated when she took her first breaths completely on her own.

We celebrated the first whole bottle of milk that she took.

We celebrated the day we took her home from the hospital 

We celebrate each milestone along the way, big and small, delayed or on time.  Most parents of premature babies know the fears of potentially never seeing each of these milestones, so I think we all celebrate to honor our warriors.  All babies develop and reach milestones at different rates, but this is especially true for premature babies.  There are many preemies that will "catch up" to their actual age peers very quickly, others will take the 2 years that many physicians allocate for preemies to "catch up" and others will never "catch up."  

We have been doing ALOT of celebrating lately.  Virginia has had an absolute explosion of milestones lately and we are just so so proud of her.  

She now crawls everywhere and is climbing on everything!   She is fast too!

She is babbling all the time.  She says bye bye on occasion and has got the "no" head shake down pat :-/

She mastered the sippy cup this week and we are down to one bottle a day!