Our little angle

Forgive us as we try to make up for the last 6 weeks of blogging in one weekend, so let's start at the beginning....

Meet our little angle. Yes, the typo is intentional. As Dave was excitedly (and tiredly) posting photos of our brand new bundle of joy to Flickr, he kept spelling "Angel" as "Angle" and thus we meet our little angle. Born on March 9, 2009 at 3:05pm, Julia Claire Brown was 7 pounds 8 ounces and 20 inches long. She was sweet and wonderful and perfect. She did, however, have a little gunk in her lungs, and the doctors decided that rather than risk a bad infection, they were going to put her on antibiotics for 7 days, and off to the NICU she went. While it was devastating for us not to be able to hold and cuddle her, and seeing her in that isolette with tubes running everywhere broke our hearts in a million pieces, we knew it was the best thing for her. And as the week wore on, and we shuttled back and forth to the hospital several times a day, we realized the many silver linings in this dark NICU cloud: first of all, our gal was by far the healthiest and strongest baby in the place. The nurses actually called her the "poster child" of the NICU! We felt so fortunate that she was strong and relatively healthy compared to many of her preemie NICU neighbors. Also, the brilliant nurses of the NICU gave us what can best be termed as "baby boot camp" training that week - they showed us how to feed her, bathe her, hold her, burp her, change her, and how to read all of the heart, blood pressure, and pulse/ox monitors (which came in handy for that ever-present question "is she breathing???").

At the end of the week, she graduated with flying colors and we were able to finally bring her home. That's when the real fun began...