Today is my due date.
Today is my due date and my daughter is already 3 months, 1 week and 6 days old.
Today is also the date they told us we could expect to bring Scarlette home from the NICU by.
Today is supposed to be homecoming in so many ways.
It was easier before this day, when complications would arise and I could still say "Well, she wasn't supposed to be here yet." When her age was being counted in gestational weeks it seemed less jarring somehow.
Now it feels like the clock just started ticking.
It's a heavier day than I thought it would be. 105 days in the NICU is wearing on us.
On the other hand, look how heartbreakingly beautiful she is. I would have missed all of this, I think, as I look down at her. This is how I would have met her, with this face and those chubby feet. Instead, in the midst of the suffering I was blessed to see her as she grew into this newbornness, my once-upon-a-time tiny one pound nine ounce baby.
It's a journey of incompatible emotions but today I'm working to focus on the greatest of these. Our family. Our Scarlette. Love.
(Also, a little background about my due date, if you're interested:)
My due date was changed several times over the course of my pregnancy so we weren't quite sure if we should expect the baby to arrive in mid February or later. They count your due date from the date of your last cycle, but since I have so many issues and am incredibly irregular, nor do I ovulate on a typical schedule, we knew there would be a lot of guessing about my due date. We had a few complications during pregnancy and so we had a lot of ultrasounds. For awhile she measured large for the gestational week she was at (ironic, right?) and they changed her due date to move it forward. Today is the date they settled on while I was in pre-term labor, from her measurements in utero at that time they decided to go back to this one, which was my cycle date and the original due date, to use as her starting point, which is why technically her official status is that she was born at 25 weeks. Personally, I still think I was a little more than a week ahead of that and developmentally she showed signs of being more like 26 weeks at birth. It doesn't sound like much but every single day in womb past 24 weeks makes an enormous difference in the life of a micro-preemie. That was way too much information for you, right?
