The Easy Part?

This is the easy part. This is the easy part!? Shit, this is the easy part.

Having two babies in the NICU isn't a piece of cake, but it's a whole lot easier than having two babies at home. I mean, NICU = 24-hour expert care. All day, every day, there is a trained nurse assigned to do nothing except feed, change, clean, and burp August and Finley. It's amazing.

Meanwhile, I am like a bumbling aunt who breezes into the NICU every day for a few of hours, holds the babies, swaddles them badly, changes their diapers badly, gets them riled up, cries sometimes for no good reason and then goes home.

Still, I'm exhausted from merely visiting the babies.

Just so you don't think I'm a total loser, I do have a busy schedule. I pump breast milk 8 times in 24 hours. That means, my first pump of the "day" is at midnight, then at 5 a.m., 8 a.m., 10 a.m., noon, 3 p.m., 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Plus, I drive 10 miles to the hospital spend 4-5 hours with the babies, come home, eat, pump, sleep, pump, sleep, pump, sleep, pump, do chores, pump, go see babies, etc. Yet, this is the easy part!

I'm already sleep deprived, cranky, moody, weepy and having hallucinations.

The other night, Matt woke me up for my midnight pump (he was just coming to bed after having watched "Fell Metal Jacket" on Netflix for reasons I couldn't fathom.)

Anyway, Matt says, "Are you going to pump now?"

I say, "Yes." Then I do not move.

Matt finishes getting ready for bed and says again, "Are you going to pump?"

I say, "Yes, but someone has to take this baby off me first."

"What baby?" Matt asks.
….

I raise my head up to try to figure out where I am and who the hell I even am. I realize I'm at home and my babies are in the NICU being cared for by someone else. I'm not even that tired, really. I'm getting enough rest to realistically maintain sanity. And I'm still losing…my…mind. In my half asleep state, I thought one of the babies was sleeping on me and that our Russian NICU nurse Lana was in the other room.

So I'm starting to think maybe I am not the best person to be trusted with two small infants. Instead, the best way for these boys to grow up is to be raised by NICU nurses in a hermetically sealed environment where visitors must scrub down "Silkwood" style before entering and the temperature never fluctuates and the babies can be hooked up to heart monitors until they are 18 and Mommy can visit every day.