You know those emails you get when someone's just had a baby and they tell you the baby's name,

what time they were born, how much they weigh, maybe they send a picture, and then it'll usually

say something like, mom and baby are doing great. Well, sometimes that's not entirely true,

or at least it's not the whole story. That was the case for us. We sent out one of those emails

that said this standard. Mom and baby are both doing great, and there was a cute little picture

of Sasha or daughter sleeping. But what you saw was just her face, and if you'd been able to see

the whole picture, you would have seen that there were leads all over her body and wires,

hooking her up to a heart monitor. There was an IV in her leg, and she was being fed through a tube.

She was in the NICU, you know, the ICU for babies, because during labor we had this pretty

common problem where there was meconium. She basically took her first poop inside me, and she

inhaled some of it into her lungs. So they had to flush her with fluids and just kind of make

sure she could breathe okay. They kept Sasha for just three days, but it was really, really hard.

You're basically in the hospital because you just had a baby, but you can't really be with that

baby. You have to take these special trips just to see the baby. And the doctors don't want to get

your hopes up too much because things could get better soon, but they could also get much worse.

So you're never sure exactly when you're going to be able to bring your baby home.

And I think when we think of the NICU, we picture primis, you know, those little one and a half

pound babies who stay in incubators for months and months. And there are definitely a lot of those

in there, but there's also a lot of babies who are there for a shorter amount of time. And we're

going to hear one of those stories today. This is the longest shortest time podcast. I'm Hillary

Frank. This is our second episode. And after the first episode, I sent out an email to a bunch of

people I knew who had just had babies and asked them if they had any struggles in early parenthood

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