Answered Prayers

After 9 days in the hospital, with about 4 of them being somewhat harrowing, I got released yesterday!!! I get to be back home but with daily monitoring at the hospital to make sure this baby continues to do okay. We have, for the time being, averted disaster. I feel like this is truly a miracle...a week and a half ago, we were prepared to deliver a very premature baby and now I am inching closer to 30 weeks.

I am enormously grateful to all of my family and friends...who called, prayed, visited, and helped keep things moving at home. I came home yesterday to a clean house with laundry done and folded, the refrigerator clean and stocked with enough to keep us fed for a couple days, and well-cared for children. My in-laws made that possible and I am so grateful to them for that. My parents both came up and stayed with me in the hospital (I now know that my father can be awoken out of any sleep by a change in a baby's heartrate on a monitor), foresaking their own comfort to sleep in pull-out hospital chairs and ensuring I got a daily (decaf!) Starbucks coffee. Jared was, as always, a rock, trekking between home and work and the hospital and bringing me any number of things and remembering to bring things I needed but wouldn't have thought of on my own.

It was a wonderful feeling to arrive at the kids' preschool yesterday and surprise them at pickup. They weren't expecting me. Last night, Charlie sat with me in the rocker for the longest time, giving me an enormous hug. This is where my heart is, for sure.

I will say, every time we meet one of these crises, God honestly doesn't let us down. Despite my best efforts, I do have moments of wondering what in the world He is trying to show me...and then somehow, we make it through and I realize...it's not always up to me to control. Cincinnati will wait until May for Charlie and I have faith that we will make it through the rest of this winter and early spring in one piece.