And then there were five.
Our sweet boy, Ev, was born in May and following in the tiny footsteps of his sister, he had trouble breathing. Official diagnosis: Severe Respiratory Distress. Heartbreaking words to hear. Looking at him in the NICU was torture. We could not hold him or talk to him because he had a "minimal stimulation" restriction from his doctors. Here are a few pitures from his first 10 days of life. In the first one, he has a C-Pap but they had to take it off because he was just too big for it and it was hurting his nose.
This picture is hard because I see both his arterial line and his I-V. They wrapped up his hands like a mummy so he could not pull them out. This little guy was known to pull out his cannula- notice that it is taped to his nose.
In the next picture, you can see 3 things that made me smile. First, he was allowed one stuffed animal and the kids picked out the cute monkey (back, right side of photo) for him. His NICU nurse, Fran, told me a story about this monkey. One day another nurse looked over and saw something with eyes flying around Ev's crib. She screamed at Fran and told her to "go check your baby!" She thought something alive was loose in there. When Fran got over to him, she saw that Ev was heartily flinging it back and forth. She laughed so hard. In addition to this stuffed animal, he was allowed to have artwork from his siblings. They were each given an index card and you can see their artwork taped to the side of his crib, below.
