Snuggling Aria

I am so grateful that if I want to snuggle my son, I just go like this:

I LITERALLY just now grabbed my camera and took this selfie while tucking him in, to prove how easy it is.

If I want to "snuggle" Aria, I have to do this:

1.  Car Ride.  45-60 minutes each way depending on traffic.  Poor Bennett, most of his naps take place in the car these days:

2.  Lots of walking from the parking garage up to the 4th floor of Primary Children's.  We take the stairs because there is construction in the hospital and there's only one working elevator.

3.  Drop off any milk I have to the NICU milk freezer.  Everything has to be bagged and tagged appropriately or they are not allowed to use it.  (she sometimes can tolerate milk through her feeding tube, it's been about half and half so far)

4.  Pick up the phone outside the security doors to the NICU and wait for security to identify us and buzz us through.

Not the phone on the left.  The one on the right.

5.  Put our things in a locker and scrub in.  If we leave her for any reason we have to re-scrub before coming back.

Even Bennett has it down.  Look at him scrubbing both sides of his wrist!

6.  Hope against hope that she is stable enough today that we are allowed to touch her.  Sometimes even just touching her causes too much stimulation and makes her blood pressure go crazy.  Every once in a while, if we're incredibly blessed and we have at least an hour of solid time to be with her (instead of being constantly interrupted by doctors) then she is doing so well that today we can hold her!!!  In that case, we stand there feeling helpless for 20 minutes while a team of 3 nurses/respiratory therapists figure out how to move around all her machinery so that all of her wires will stretch far enough.  The alarms on everything are constantly firing off during this process which usually makes me cry.

She was getting an EEG this day. . .hence the skull cap and the extra 100 wires!

7.  Another 10 minutes of them adjusting all her tubes and ventilator once she's on our lap.  Then we basically stay still the whole time we're holding her, although every time her alarms go off the nurse comes over and adjust her setup some more.  Then reverse the whole process when we put her back.

BUT.

It is totally worth it.