Everything I Need to know I Learned in the NICU

So for those of you who don't know, the girls are FINALLY home. They came home on January 2nd after a VERY LONG holiday weekend. But it's great to have them home. Addison's look in this picture pretty much says it all.



Bart and I were talking and we realized that we learned all sorts of stuff while the kids were in the NICU. I feel bad for Addison and Hannah because apparently there's a bunch of stuff that we could have done to develop their coordination...among other things.

I specifically mention coordination because of this:



Do you see that rather faint yellow bruise on the upper right side of her forehead? This is a reoccurring bruise. Hannah is constantly bumping into things with that big old head of hers. In fact, she does it so much that it doesn't even faze her any more. Today she ran around a table corner and WHACK! Right in the same spot. It was hard enough to make me gasp, but she didn't even blink. She just kept running around. It made me think that maybe if we had done that little rubbing the feet on the legs thing they showed us in the NICU maybe she wouldn't be running into tables...or maybe she still would.

This is the other cool thing we learned in the NICU.



It's called a swaddle bath. You basically bathe the baby in a blanket and uncover parts of the body as you wash them, then recover them. It helps the baby retain body heat. AWESOME! The girls love it...but then all my kids loved baths once they could be immersed in the water.

Here's Maya's little swaddle Bath.



I'm pretty sure we weren't washing her feet at the time, so they weren't supposed to be out of the blanket. But I'm happy to say that she survived anyway.