We've gone WIRELESS!

This afternoon during nap time, there was an unexpected ring at the front door. When I opened the door, I found two mysterious men standing on my stoop. I think they noticed my confused face so they explained that they had come to pick up the apnea monitors. If they thought my face looked confused then, I'm sure it looked even more perplexed when they told me that because even though the most recent data from the monitors had been downloaded a couple weeks ago, we still had not heard anything.

The protocol has been that the data gets sent to a doctor in North Carolina who analyzes it and then sends a report over to the pediatrician, who in turn, calls me with the results. I explained to them that I had no idea that they were coming or that the babies had been discharged from the monitors so I told them I wanted to call the pediatrician first before taking the monitors off the babies. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get through the gauntlet of menu options at the pediatrician's office in a timely manner in order to speak to someone with a pulse so one of the guys called someone from his office, who verified to me that the order came from our pediatric group and the name of the nurse who put in the order. Once I had the okay, I unhooked each baby from the monitor but not before taking some photos. It was fun watching my father, my husband and my mother each enter the house today and see how long it took for them to notice that the babies were wireless!

Krista holding on tight not wanting to part with her dear friend

Part of me wanted to shout from the rooftop: "We're free at last!" as these monitors have been quite the nuisance over the past 175 days since the babies came home from the NICU on them but I knew the babies weren't going to be as excited as their dear mommy. You have to understand that these babies have never NOT been hooked up by wires and cords to some kind of beeping machine! In the past months, the babies have become very attached to their monitor cord. We even wondered if the babies were having umbilical cord confusion since the monitor cord has been clipped to their clothing around the navel. The cord has kind of acted as a security blanket for them, especially Jamison.

He was asleep when the men showed up to take away his prized possession so he didn't know what hit him when he woke up and realized something was missing. The monitor cord has acted a the teether of choice. Tonight already, we caught a couple of the babies searching for the cord to grab onto but of course, they were not successful. It will be interesting to see how the babies adapt in the upcoming days. I suppose mommy and daddy will have to adapt as well. It will be strange not having to weave an electrode wire in and out of pajama snaps after every diaper change, wrangle wires away from a baby's tight grasp throughout the day, lug a box and wire up and down the stairs along with a baby multiple times a day, unwrap a baby who has gotten wound up like a ball of yarn in the cord's slack, wake up in the middle of the night to check on a baby whose monitor is going off because the electrode moved and is monitoring someone's stomach instead of a lung, and so on.

Kiera playing with her electrode wires during her diaper change for the very last time

As Julie Andrews would sing in one of my favorite movies,

"So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu!"

We go back to the pediatrician's office on Thursday for Round 4 of Synagis so we'll let you know then what it was like to take the babies out without having to haul monitors along with them!