The First 27 Days

I know I am going to have to make a conscious effort to NOT constantly compare Jayla and Tamyra to each other. And one thing has made that relatively easy so far. And that is the fact that for the first 27 days of Jayla's life, she was primarily cared for by the wonderful nurses in her NICU. As her parents, we could feasibly have done nothing for her at all during that period and she would have still been well taken care of.

Tamyra, on the other hand, has been with us constantly since they brought her to my hospital room about an hour after I got out of the recovery room. She left my hospital room for about 30 minutes a day during our hospital stay - just long enough to be weighed and bathed each day. I relished in the fact that she and I could inhabit the same room because Jayla and I couldn't.

Tamyra also got to nurse when she was just a couple of hours old and, dare I say, it actually just seemed to come very naturally for her and the whole experience has just been infinitely less frustrating and easier than when I learned to nurse with a 3-week-old who had been taking pacifiers since day 1 and bottles since day 6.

And remember those tears that I didn't shed in the operating room? Yeah, apparently, I was reserving them for that Kodak moment when me and my baby left the hospital AT THE SAME TIME. It was something that I sorely missed out on the first time and was so grateful for the experience this time. And even though I called it a Kodak moment, (1) I have a Canon this time around (it was a Kodak with Jayla) and (2) there are no actual pictures of the occasion.

People have always talked about the newborn days when their children did nothing more than sleep, eat, and poop. I had no such stories before now. Those three activities represent the bulk of what Tamyra has spent her life doing so far. And we have wanted so badly to contrast Tamyra's behavior to Jayla's newborn behavior, when in reality we haven't been able to do that because Jayla wasn't with us. We did not get her home with us until she was a very alert 1-month-old baby.

Tamyra is 4 weeks old today. That means that yesterday was day 27 for her. Yesterday, she was the precise age that Jayla was when we brought her home. And while this time with Tamyra has gone by so much faster than our NICU stay did, I couldn't help but spend quite a bit of energy acknowledging yesterday's milestone. And until now, we have been in previously unchartered parenthood territory. We're finally getting to the part that we've done before. But, thank God we're skipping the hurricane evacuation that we endured on Jayla's day 29!