Posts

Showing posts from September, 2025

Faith and Friends

Image
If I were to ask people who know Faith what one of her favorite activities is, I am pretty sure they would all say the same thing: socializing. Faith absolutely loves people. She has been a social butterfly ever since she was little.  She has always enjoyed going to therapy because she loves meeting new people, even those in the waiting room. Doctor appointments are also great because she gets to meet new nurses. She pretty much makes friends wherever she goes!  Faith and friends blowing out birthday candles when she turned 7  During her first years in school, she easily made friends with her classmates. Sadly, though, as the kids got older and since she was limited in her mobility, these friendships faded. When we pulled her out of school altogether in order to homeschool her, the hardest part was not having any friends.  Thankfully, we lived in a building that had a community room. Faith and I would often hang out there for a change of scenery. She would sit and wa...

Faith's 73-Day NICU Stay

Image
September is  NICU Awareness Month . For those who don't know, NICU is an acronym for Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. According to  World Metrics  50,000 premature babies in the United States receive care each year in the NICU.  The average NICU stay for a preemie is 25 days. Honestly, that number surprises me, as I thought it would be much higher than that. Along with preemies, full-term babies born with certain health issues, such as respiratory distress, jaundice, and other kinds of infections receive care in the NICU.  Tiny Faith in her isolette at Mayo  But for Faith, whose untimely birth consisted of an emergency C-section 11 weeks early, it took 73 days before she was discharged. Those 73 days were a major emotional rollercoaster! And for many reasons, one of which was being nearly 600 miles from home as Faith was born at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (You can read what led up to that on my post,  October 4, 2003: A Day I'll Ne...