Oh my goodness. We are home. Four days after open heart surgery.

I wasn’t anticipating it and I have mixed feelings about it.

On one hand, it made me nervous taking him out of the hospital with fresh scars. We have to do things a little differently for awhile, like we cannot pick him up by his underarms. Imagine having to scoop up your 10 month old like a newborn! It’s not easy. He is not a small boy. We have to do that for about 8 weeks until his sternum is healed. The times it’s most difficult is getting him out of the bath and out of the car seat. Doable, but you definitely have to think before you grab him. We also have to try and keep him off his stomach as much as possible, but for someone who is just learning to crawl… well, it’s tricky. He hasn’t tried laying on it yet, probably still quite sore. But we’ll see how he does in a few days. We have to be careful, but also don’t want to delay his milestones any more either.

He has lost a couple pounds and I worry about his food intake. He hasn’t thrown up since 5:30 this morning, but he’s also only been eating a couple ounces of breastmilk here and there. Can we quickly talk about how glad I am that I made the decision to keep pumping this whole time?? His stomach hasn’t tolerated formula or solid food yet. Fresh breastmilk is the only thing he’s been able to keep down. I’m not making enough any more to feed him only milk through the day, but it will suffice for a little bit until he can start eating other things.

The upside of all this is that we are HOME. It’s scary but so much more comfortable and familiar and happy. So while I’m nervous, I’m glad. Right when we walked in the door, all of us took a nap! And I’m excited to sleep in our big ol’ squishy bed tonight. It gives me a back-ache, but its a million times better than any hospital chair/bed!