A Thankful Thanksgiving

This was the precious face that greeted us Wednesday when we went to the Special Care Nursery.  This was a very happy day.  We learned that Guinevere had passed the last 24 hours with great success.  She had taken more than enough with her feedings (needing a required 180 milliliters of milk in four feedings in twelve hours, and having taken over 200 milliliters!).  She also had only one small alarm earlier that morning but she came out of it herself.  She was doing so well that we were told that if she "behaved herself" then she would maybe get to come home the following day, Thanksgiving Day.

The next morning I phoned the NICU, eager to learn if we would get to celebrate the holiday with our entire family together.  The nurse answered, I gave our "parent code" and then asked how Evvie was.  The first thing I heard was, "She's doing great.  In fact, we think she gets to go home tomorrow!"  Tomorrow?  I was surprisingly disappointed. I had been preparing myself for a Friday discharge, just so that I would not experience this precise disappointment.  And yet, disappointment still came, especially after learning why she was not being discharged:  She had only gained ten grams two days earlier.  Two days earlier?  If that was the beef, then couldn't they have told us that the day before?!

Oh well.  We were just thankful that our daughter was doing spectacularly well and that she would be coming home the next day.  And we enjoyed our Thanksgiving Feast:

And after the food was eaten and the children were down for their naps, we went to celebrate with Guinevere (and watch a host of videos and listen to a lot of lectures on how to be a parent, all the while thinking to ourselves, "Hmmm . . .  We have done this whole newborn/infancy (and even preemie!) thing two other times in the last THREE years . . .  I think we're pretty good on all categories."  But we would do whatever it took to bring our daughter home.)  This is Dave and Evvie "celebrating" this wonderful Day of Thanks together: