It's a... Cupcake!

Never have I loved having my iPhone as much as I have over these past many weeks. Every email and message on flickr, facebook and my blog came to me via my phone at points when I really needed to have some good thoughts coming my way. Thank you!

I really haven't had much energy for responding to things, and now it seems like so much time has passed - please forgive me and know that I appreciated every single message!

Here is a quick overview of our wild ride:

Saturday, June 17^th, we went up to Grand Forks for a family wedding. That evening I wasn’t feeling quite right, so Mr. 5 and I went to the ER just to get reassurance that all was well. Instead of getting reassurance, I was admitted with preeclampsia and told to get ready to deliver that week (10 weeks early!).

Both Mr. 5 and I felt very strongly about having this happen back home, so luckily on Monday I was transported via ambulance from Grand Forks down to Abbott in Minneapolis.

The goal was to let cupcake keep growing inside me as long as possible, but on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning the preeclampsia started to affect my liver – that meant delivery needed to happen right away.

Our little Cupcake was born at 5:44 a.m. on Wednesday, July 22. She was 3 lbs 6 ounces and came out crying!

In the 24 hours after she was born, I was not recovering quite as expected. There was some scariness on Wednesday night getting me stable, but nothing 4 units of blood and a little monitoring in the ICU couldn’t fix.

Cupcake has done amazingly well since arriving a bit early in the world. She needed a bit of help with oxygen as her first day went on, so they put her on a C-Pap machine (which is like a baby version of the ones folks use for sleep apnea).

On her third day she graduated from the C-Pap machine to just a nasal cannula (the little tube that blows oxygen under her nose).

After a few days she was breathing room air just fine.

Over the past weeks, our Cupcake has been growing....

and growing...

and growing!

She is now about 5 and a half pounds! It blows my mind that she has grown so fast.

We are hearing talk from doctors and nurses that she could come home as early as next week.

ETA: I just looked at the post settings, and I started writing this post on August 7th - I hope my next post doesn't take quite so long.