Our Preemie Success Story — Our 27-Week Baby Has Grown Into A Happy, Thriving 7 Year Old

This article was originally written in March 2008 for Living90045.com, a community blog featuring news, views, tips & chatter from Westchester, CA.

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For reasons that have never been fully explained to us, our daughter, Zoe, was born 13 weeks early.

Many people along the way have said to us some variation of “gee, that must have been really hard [or scary].” The truth is, we were first time parents and didn’t know any different. Didn’t all parents give birth to babies as small as their hand, only to see the baby whisked off to the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit (“NICU”) to be laid out like a dead chicken under a heat lamp and plugged into a ventilator??? What did we know?

Fortunately, our naiveté knew no bounds and we give it much credit for our happy ending. We didn’t focus on how things “should have” looked, because we didn’t know what that looked like. We focused on our blessings. Maybe mind-numbing exhaustion helped.

We set out immediately to do everything in our power to support this little Continue reading “Our Preemie Success Story — Our 27-Week Baby Has Grown Into A Happy, Thriving 7 Year Old”

It DOES Rain In Southern California!!

This article was originally posted on Active Rain in September 2007.

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 Anybody who tells you that it doesn’t rain in Southern Calfornia was not with us up at Big Bear over Labor Day weekend!  What an adventure that was!  I grew up in the Northwest and I know a thing or two about rain, but it seems that I’m way out of practice.

I’m blessed with a group of distant cousins here in Southern California that “adopted” me a few years I moved down here.  Every Labor Day, without fail, this bunch meets up for the long Labor Day weekend for an adventure.  When I first joined in, the trips were tent camping and campfires.  As we get older Continue reading “It DOES Rain In Southern California!!”