3 Weeks Old and Breathing on His Own: Delhi Day 11

I walked into the NICU today, glanced over to where Hayden's incubator is usually located, saw a happy, healthy, wide-eyed, breathing assistance-free baby  in his spot and began to search the room for my son.

Then it dawned on me. Could that be him?!? I am embarrassed to say that I crept over to the incubator, held my breath, and slowly checked his hospital bracelet.

And it was HIM!!!

Gone was my sick, pale, struggling baby, and in his place was a vibrant, bug-eyed, "smiley" boy, kicking and grabbing at everything in reach. I could not believe it! I just stared and cried and laughed as he looked at me with his beautiful blue eyes as if you say, Mommy, are you really surprised?

And surprised I shouldn't be. Given all the obstacles these children have had to overcome to become OURS, surely I shouldn't have expected a minor 29 week delivery to stand in their way.

An interesting side note...yesterday, I received our embryology report for the surrogate who ultimately carried our babies. If you recall, after our first two surrogate cycles failed, we transferred our frozen embryos to two new surrogates.

That put us at a total of 23 embryo transfers-- each with a 70% chance of success.

While the initial 19 embryos transferred were all perfect blasts and 8-cell grade Is, on our 3rd and 4th surrogacy attempts, one of our surrogates received our 4 lesser quality frozen day 2 embryos.

Want to take a guess which ones resulted in our babies?

Happy 3 week birthday to OUR Scarlett and Hayden!

Don't worry, I didn't forget about Scarlett, but as my doctor would say "Yeah, yeah, the girl, you know, she is always doing fine."