The Babies are Here!

Last Tuesday afternoon I went in for a check-up.  They had some lab results back that showed that I might be in the very early stages of preeclampsia.  They told me to leave their office and go directly to the Labor and Delivery unit of the attached hospital.  For more "tests and monitoring."  By 3:00 a.m., the constant tests and monitoring determined that the babies had to be born THEN because my vitals were getting precipitously worse. And we had an emergency c-section.  They knocked me out under general anaesthesia.  James was at my side as I kept yelling, "I can still feel that!  Ow!  Ow!" and then when the anaesthesia kicked in, "Where am I?  I don't know where I am?  James!!!"  How scary.  Minutes later the neonatal doctors were running out of the room with two babies, breathing for them by squeezing a bag of oxygen over their little faces. So scary.  So scary.  So scary. But now it's all over and we have children. Babies.   We have two baby girls.  Amanda June (born at 14 lbs, 13 oz.) and Elisa Katherine (13 lbs, 13 oz.)  They're tiny.  And I never knew I could love anybody like that before.  I never knew James could.  We finally had to check out of the hospital over the weekend and it was so sad to have to leave them there.  We're only a mile away and have visited three times a day since.  But we yearn for the time we can pick them up whenever we want -- when they have no wires or tubes that need to be organized before we do -- and feed them and explore their tiny naked bodies.  Most of the time they are handed to us, they are already wrapped (with their wires) up in burrito swaddled form.  I just want to get all that stuff off and hold them to my chest.  And maybe hold them both at the same time.  Or lie down with them.   Just to have them home. Despite this heartrending yearning, James and I spend our evenings alone, talking about how happy we are and how wonderful the girls are.  The conversation is not very varied, but neither of us thinks it's boring to hear the "They are just so cute!" comment over and over again, as if it's news each time. It's been a long, long path to this point.  I wish I could tell my friends who are still fighting with infertility that it's not as great as all that, that it would be fine if they didn't ever get to have children.  But it's not true.  It's the best thing that could ever happen in the whole wide world.  And I don't know how I got so lucky.