Glad to be Home; Home is still Hard

Finishing up five days with our son at home. Have to keep reminding myself this is real — we do not have to check Metro-North train times and worry about snow and make sure we have someone to watch our four-year-old. People say, “it must be great to have him home!” and of course it is, but it’s also hard, since he is still a newborn baby who hasn’t even reached his due date yet, even though it feels like he’s been alive forever.

We found with our four-year-old, and now with our baby, it’s interesting — the baby you bring home from the NICU is a completely different baby from the one who lived in the hospital. I don’t know if it’s the environment of the NICU — the sounds, the lights, the frequent attacks on their person (needle sticks, blood pressure checks, IV lines, feeding tubes) that scares them into compliance, or what it is — maybe it’s age and maturity, mostly — but, both babies, in the NICU, were these quiet, submissive beings. They would calmly be changed (for the most part), calmly be fed on their strict 3-hour schedule (for the most part), and then return to calmly sleep alone in their cribs (for the most part). They were happy to be snuggled and held, but they never seemed like they required it — they could be put back down.

And then you bring them home, and they are… louder. Less compliant, more demanding. Our four-year-old quickly shifted himself to an every-two-hour feeding schedule, which made rest between feeds… a challenge. Our baby isn’t quite there yet, but there are feeds he’s demanding less than two hours apart, and then there are other times he can wait the three hours, and it isn’t terribly predictable. I remember with our four-year-old, for a while the only way he would settle is if one of us had a hand on him in his bassinet — we would have to try to sleep with one arm awkwardly reaching inside, on his back, holding his hand, anything, he just needed the contact. With our baby, he is easily soothed when held — a good thing, for sure — but reluctant to be put down. We empathize — we want to hold him too, to make up for all the holding we didn’t get to do for 70 days — but it’s hard to be a prisoner to it, when we also need to go to the bathroom, shower, sleep.

I am thankful that right now his biggest issue is gas, which I gather is a normal non-NICU baby issue — but I also feel bad minimizing our own concern about his gas, since it has made him intermittently unhappy over these past five days (and nights). The NICU sent him home with a bunch of additions to breast milk — an enriched preemie formula twice a day, a few milliliters of something called MCT oil added to some of his feeds — to help him gain weight at a faster clip. Trial and error — and Google — has led us to believe that these are contributing to the gas. We’re trying to find a balance — how much can he tolerate without becoming too fussy, and is that enough for him to gain weight appropriately? Is mixing the formula powder with breast milk more gentle than the ready-to-drink formula? Is it the oil that is the bigger culprit, or is it the formula? Can we cut one of them out and still get the weight gain?

But the fact that we have to figure out that balance, make trade-offs involving how much discomfort we’ll permit him to suffer, measure these things in droppers and teaspoons — is a reminder that he is not just a normal baby, but still, in a few ways, a patient. Our four-year-old caught a cold — a mild cold, a cold that barely registers as a cold, like one sneeze a day— two days before his brother came home. We’ve had to somehow keep him six feet away from the baby for a week without making him feel like this baby is ruining his life. The baby has made him a highly-policed prisoner in his home — no, you can only show Mommy your artwork from school if you stand in the kitchen while she looks at it from the den. No, you can’t use your bathroom anymore, you need to use ours. No, you can’t hold the baby, even though I love that you really, really want to.

I caught the same mild cold that barely registers as a cold on Wednesday night, after somehow avoiding it for days. So now my wife is on 100% baby duty, which isn’t fair to her, but what else can we do? We bought masks — I’m wearing a mask whenever I’m in the vicinity — but a mask isn’t 100%, and if our baby ends up sick and back in the hospital, we will regret not having done everything humanly possible to protect him. So while I am trying to make myself useful in as many ways as I can — bottles, laundry, dishwasher, intercepting our four-year-old before he makes a run for the baby’s room — there are not that many ways to be useful with a baby when you can’t go near the baby. So I feel guilty for catching the cold, but at the same time, what can I do?

All night on Wednesday, we were worried — had the baby caught the cold in the window before I felt symptoms and stopped holding him? Two hours earlier, while holding the baby, I had coughed. I didn’t recognize it as an I’m-getting-sick cough, but in retrospect, I guess it was. The fact that I can point to a cough — that it registered as a thing in my mind worth noting and remembering, even though I didn’t feel sick at the time — is a reminder that he is still not just a normal baby. (So far, no sign of illness — fortunately.)

We had the heating/air conditioning repairman here yesterday, to fix a leaky humidifier part, and he coughed. Twice. (Yes, I am counting everyone’s coughs, not just mine.) The moment he left, I Clorox-wiped literally every surface he touched, may have touched, might have looked at. A bunch of people have said friendly, normal things like, “can’t wait to meet the baby,” and it just makes us want to run away. No, you’re not meeting the baby! Not anytime soon, at least!

We are forced to be crazy. We don’t want to be crazy. We really don’t, but what else can we do? We have to protect our five-pound baby. I’ll Clorox-wipe the container of Clorox wipes if I have to. I’m sure the people on the road who saw me driving to our doctor’s appointment this afternoon — wearing a face mask in the car — thought I was crazy. And the receptionist at the doctor’s office, when I said our baby was waiting with my wife in the hall.*

But I’d rather be crazy than back in the hospital. So, yes, it’s great to have him home. But it’s also hard. (It will get easier, I know.)

*After I checked in at the doctor’s office, a mother came in with her son, probably about 9 years old. The doctor’s office has a “sick” waiting area and a “well” waiting area, although they’re only separated by a half-wall, so it’s not a particularly effective separation. Nevertheless — the son was about to sit down in the (empty!) sick area, and the mother stopped him — “no, don’t sit there, that’s for sick people.” The son looked at her. “Mom, I’m sick.” The mother rolled her eyes. “I still don’t want you sitting there.” And she sat down on the “well” side. This is why we had our baby wait in the hall. Oy!