One Month Old!

I had the best intentions of making Rémi’s hospital stay as close to normal as possible. That includes celebrating milestones, like turning one month old. David and I went shopping (an unbelievably rare occurrence since most of our time is spent bedside). We found the cutest milestone blanket with a woodland scene. You know the one. Numbers 1 through 12 on one side, room for baby on the other and a cute little marker to denote “weeks or months” below.

I had planned to lay this out in his crib and get an adorable shot of him yesterday so we could watch how he was growing each month. I wanted to put him in a cute matching outfit. The hospital life had a different idea for my plans. In fact, it took my plans and stomped all over them.

Rémi spiked a low grade fever the afternoon before his big one month milestone. In a 4 week old hospitalized infant, this is very worrisome. We got wheeled into an isolation room where David and I spent our time taking shifts so someone was always there to comfort him. They ran the gamut of tests on him….viral, respiratory, sepsis, blood borne, bacterial, urine etc . They wanted to do a lumbar poke to check brain antibodies, but we were freaked out enough without the added risk of a spinal needle on our little guy.

His fever continued for a few more hours and they started a general course of IV antibiotics. Needless to say, Rémi was not feeling up to a staged photo shoot held by yours truly . To be honest, in between holding Rémi, pumping (those breastmilk antibodies seemed even more important now!) and long overnighter, I also forgot about the milestone blanket until today.

So far, all of the test results have come back negative and Rémi’s fever broke overnight. I’ll chalk it up to all the extra cuddles, though I’m sure the antibiotics played a bigger role. Instead of celebrating his one month birthday, the milestone we marked instead was learning to roll with the punches. You can make the best plans in here, but hospital life is going to continue to throw us off. This month's milestone was marked with a little bit of patience, a whole lot of love and as any new mother can attest to…some serious sleep deprivation.

Maybe once the little monkey is feeling better, we will do a belated one month photo! Until then, here's an adorable photo to tie you over.