oh frabjous day!

Oh, lovely people:

Here's the great news — little Lucy is out of ICU! We moved out yesterday afternoon, and I have never been so happy to see a door swing closed behind me. She's doing splendidly. She had her breathing tube removed on Saturday — we can finally see her entire face — and everything has been stable ever since. All her breathing levels and stats are solid, she's sleeping and pooping and doing all the things that babies do.

We're on the pediatric unit now, so we share a room with another family, and we get up in the middle of the night to soothe her. We've changed her diaper multiple times, rocked her to sleep to the rhythm of our heartbeats, and learned her cry in the middle of the night and predicted what she might need. We're finally feeling like parents.

She's an alive, healthy child. We believe she always was. She just gave us a scare, and then she got sucked into the medical vortex. We're determined, when we take her home, to just treat her like a baby and not be worried all the time.

And we're learning her personality. She sweet and feisty at the same time. She makes her needs known, which makes it fairly easy to soothe her. (We can't imagine this is going to last.) The past two days, she has opened her eyes wide and taken in everything, slowly. She's pensive, her right hand always resting on her chin, like Rodin's The Thinker. We can't gobble up enough of her little coos and gurgles. We're totally smitten.

The Chef and I are back to making senseless comments, reading the paper, and talking about other things besides the baby. We're cracking each other up. The cot we sleep on is tiny, but at least we have the chance to snuggle.

And it looks good for us getting back to our own bed soon. Lucy simply has to start eating more and more. They say as soon as she eats regularly and keeps gaining weight, they will take out her naso-gastral tube, the last one linger. That means that somewhere in the next few days, we can go home.

She'll be home with us soon.

We find it fitting that the last hoop our daughter has to jump through has to do with food.

She'll be fine. We're over the moon.

Thank you all, so much for all your emails and comments, your kindness with your own stories and hugs offered from around the world. Truly, we have read every comment to each other before we published. You buoyed us up when we were thrashing around, feeling as though we were drowning.

Thank you, so much, from the center of our expanding hearts. We felt the connection, the light offered, the genuine outpouring of wonderful words. You're part of her community, and I know she felt how many people were pulling for her.

Someday, this will all be a bad memory.

But for now, it's time to go stare at the baby.

love to you all,
shauna, danny, and lucy