hard stages

It is hard not being able to bring our baby home. I think that, during these first weeks of Dane's life, there are a number of stages that we've gone through.

The first stage was the stage of uncertainty. The first days/weeks we didn't really know if anything was permanently "wrong" with him, if he had any birth defects or other problems that would affect him (and us) in the long-term. This was the hardest part for Larissa, which made it the hardest for me to see. She was so overwhelmed with fear that she'd done something to cause the premature birth. Facing the idea that nothing was happening how we dreamed it would was so hard and we both felt confused by why God was allowing things to happen in the way they did. We both felt incredibly lucky during this time to have each other to lean on. Luckily, it seems from all of the testing that everything about Dane is great and that everything points to him living a long healthy life. What a relief. As new parents, we already worry about our little Dane.

The second stage somewhat overlaps the first, but it comes after you know everything about how he's doing and now are just waiting for him to get strong enough to come home. That's the stage we're now in. We feel guilty when we do anything other than go to the NICU to be with him. We miss him when we're home without him. We feel like there is maybe something that we should be doing that would help him come home sooner. We are excited when he feeds well and discouraged when he doesn't. It is a stressful, emotional waiting game.

And we are looking ahead to the third stage, which will be all of the adjustments that will happen once he finally does come home. How will we feel once he's off of his monitors 24 hours per day? How will we handle it when he cries and we know that his diaper is clean and he isn't hungry? Then what? How will we deal with him waking up throughout the night and deciding he wants to scream instead of sleep? I need my beauty sleep... We expect this to be a really hard stage, one that will require a lot from us, and in turn, will cause us to depend on many of you for advice and help.

About a week or two ago I had the opportunity to speak to a group of seniors at Wheaton College as part of their senior capstone class. The professor was one of my favorites from my time at Wheaton and he essentially told me to just talk about my time in college and since college about what I've learned and what I wish I knew when I was in their shoes. I had a number of topics run through my head at first, ideas for what I could talk about as my unifying point so that I didn't just ramble. I thought about having my main topic be "sometimes life doesn't go how you want but you just need to make the best of it" or "God doesn't give you more than you can handle, even if you think everything will overwhelm you." I feel those are important things to undertand, but I wanted to give the class something more helpful, something you didn't hear in Church recently. So, after thinking about it, I talked about "Living for Now." So many times in my life, I've looked forward to the next stage of life. In middle school, I couldn't wait until I was in High School. I just knew that when I was a high schooler, when I was on the high school track team, that everything would be better. Then I got to high school and couldn't wait for college. College is where everything would get more fun, more applicable, where my life would start getting to how I wanted it to be. But then during college, I started thinking about Medical School. Nobody looks forward to medical school, but I thought that once I was done with medical school then I could settle down, buy a house and a car and get married and have some kids. But now I have residency ahead of me - 3 more years of hoping for the next stage. And I'm sure there'll be something after residency, maybe saying things will be better once I pay off my school loans or pay off my mortgage. Maybe I'm thinking about how much better life will be once Dane comes home, or once Dane is sleeping through the night. I know Larissa is thinking how great it will be when she can stop breastfeeding and she can go more than 4 hours without pumping/feeding. But I challenged the seniors, as I constantly am needing to challenge myself, that we need to spend more time Living for Now. There are so many great things in my life right now that I'd miss if I was just counting down for 3 years from now, or 10 years from now, or retirement. I have a great wife, a great healthy son. We have our own apartment. We live close enough to go to downtown Chicago for an afternoon. It is almost summer. So many things to enjoy now.

There are a lot of hard stages when you have a new baby, especially a baby in the NICU. Waiting is hard. It's hard not to be able to bring Dane home and not be able to be with him all of the time. It's hard to have a lot of our future in the air. But Larisa and I are trying to enjoy each day, to Live for Now, rather than only count down until the future.