Grayson’s Homecoming

On Saturday at 2pm, Cathy and I walked out of Kaiser Anaheim as we had done almost every day for the last 2 and a half months. The only difference was that, this time, our newborn son Grayson was with us. After 56 days in the NICU (68 days if you count the two weeks of hospital bed-rest that Cathy had to undergo prior to Gray’s birth) Grayson was finally coming home.

It’s funny the little things you think about when you’re bringing your infant child home: “This is the first time he’s feeling sunlight.”  “I wish I’d washed the car. This is a momentous occasion and it really deserves a clean vehicle.”  “Dang, Cathy looks hot!”

We loaded our precious cargo into the backseat and Cathy climbed in beside him, while I got behind the wheel. As I pulled onto the 91 freeway and began the 20 mile drive home that has become so familiar, I was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion and my eyes began to overflow with tears. I cried for a lot of reasons:

Exhaustion: Words can’t properly express how grueling the last three months have been. There was a constant stream of demands that needed to happen since the day Cathy went into the hospital – there was the daily care of Ethan that needed to be arranged, work responsibilities, figuring out insurance issues and the little task of finding and moving into a new home that didn’t have mold in it. Then there was the emotional weight that was far heavier than any of the physical demands.

Relief: The last three months were a harrowing trip through the valley of the shadow of death. But as terrifying as each step has been, it could have been so much harder and so much worse. As we sat in the NICU on Friday getting the last minute training we needed to bring a preemie home, I overheard the doctor talking with the father of another child, a little girl named Sabrina. He was explaining that she had lost a little weight and dipped back under 3 lbs. Now, having been in that same position with Grayson some 8 weeks before, I suspected that she was just a newborn, but when I looked at her chart on the wall, I was shocked to see that she was actually older than Grayson by a week. She had been in the NICU 5 days longer than my son but was only just getting to where he had started out. In that moment, I realized just how monumental Grayson’s early release from the hospital was. After all he’d been through, the infections, the pneumonia, the collapsed lungs, and the myriad other challenges he faced, the fact that he was in the back of our car headed home to meet his big brother for the first time some three weeks before he was even supposed to be born was a miracle! Many of my tears were tears of relief that this part of our journey had finally come to a close.

Joy and Gratitude: The rest of my tears were those of a father who was excited to finally be bringing his family together, to finally be able to hold his son whenever he wanted, to be able to carry him in his arms without the intrusion of electronic tethers and squawking monitors.  Finally, after two months of holding my breath and praying for God’s protection, I got to feel the joy of a father with a healthy newborn. And as I drove home, observing the speed limit for the first time, I silently thanked God for this gift of Grayson in the backseat.

As I write this, my boy is sleeping on the couch next to me, swaddled in a warm blanket and apparently dreaming of something judging from his soft grunts and squeals. Every once in a while, he smiles and I feel a serenity that I haven’t felt in months. Peace has come to the Wayman household and I intend to rest in it for a while.

Thank you, God, for the gift of my son. May I never take his life or any of the other gifts you have showered on us for granted. And may you watch over Sabrina and all the other children still in the NICU, using that time not only to prepare them for the rest of their lives, but also to draw their parents into a more intimate dependency on you. 

The Power of Physical Touch

I’ve heard stories through the years of how important physical touch can be to the healthy development of children – how infants in orphanages would literally die for lack of human interaction and how premature babies in developing countries would flourish without the help of modern medicine because they rested on their mother’s chest rather than in an incubator. I’ve heard these stories, but throughout my infant son’s 2-month stay in the hospital I have been given tangible proof that physical touch is crucial to his development.

The first week of Grayson’s life was so tenuous that Cathy and I were not allowed to hold him in any way. We were even cautioned not to speak loudly enough for him to hear as it was likely to agitate him and cause his vital signs to drop. And, as with many newborn babies whether premature or not, he limped along and lost about 10% of his body weight in those first 7 days. But then the doctors allowed Cathy to hold him on her chest about 3 hours a day. And we began to see a rapid improvement in his growth. In that first day of sleeping on his mommy’s chest, listening to her heartbeat, feeling the warmth of her skin against his and being rocked by the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, he put on a full ounce. That may not seem like much until you consider that at 2lb. 11oz., one ounce was over 2% of his body mass. It was also the first weight he had gained outside of the womb. And that was just the beginning. Over the course of that first week, as he daily rested on either his mommy’s or my chest, he not only regained all of the weight he’d lost in the first 7 days of life, but added several ounces more. His breathing ability also took a quantum leap forward during that time.

Now, I recognized the interesting connection between Grayson’s weight gain and the daily dose of physical touch, but I initially wrote it off as coincidental. After all, all newborns lose weight at first and then gain it back. But then two weeks ago Cathy and I got sick at the same time and we were forced to find out what would happen to Grayson when he wasn’t being held by us every day.

When Cathy came down with a cold I took over the daily cuddle time at the NICU. But then, a few days later, I also started to exhibit symptoms and I was forced to stay away as well. At first Grayson didn’t seem to be greatly affected. He gained an ounce each of the first two nights, which was still forward progress even though he had been putting on an average of 2 ounces a day the week before. However, as the week progressed and Cathy and I weren’t getting better, his progress stalled completely. Over the next three days, Grayson stopped gaining weight altogether. In fact, a couple nights he actually lost a little weight. 


To put it in perspective, whereas the week before he had put on a full pound (16 oz.) over seven days, but during the six days that he didn’t get his daily dose of cuddle time he added only 3 total ounces (that’s a 75% drop in daily weight gain). At first we were concerned that he might have caught our cold from us, but as he didn’t show any other symptoms, it became increasingly obvious that wasn’t the explanation.

On Saturday, Cathy was finally healthy enough to go hold Gray, and we saw an immediate effect. Whereas over the week we couldn't see him in the hospital he had averaged a mere ½ ounce of growth a day, he gained a full 2 ounces that first night, and last night he gained another 2 ounces.

I can no longer deny that my son’s progress is affected by the amount of physical touch that he gets, especially from his parents. Throughout last week, as Cathy and I were forced to stay home the nurses tried to provide some TLC, but as they had other responsibilities they couldn’t lay there and hold him on their chest for 3 solid hours. Besides, Grayson can recognize Cathy and my smell, the pace of our heartbeats, the cadence of our breathing and the sound of our voices.  He knows when we are there and I’m convinced that he needs the connection from his parents to flourish.

As of this morning Grayson is 5lbs. 13 oz., nearly double his birth weight. He is also breathing on his own and eating on his own rather than being fed through a tube. The doctors are suggesting that Grayson might come home this week. I hope that’s the case because I’d like to hold my son a lot more than once a day!

The Perfect Kid

As an expectant parent, there are a lot of things you tend to worry about: “What will my kid be like?” “What sex will it be?” “Is he or she forming correctly?” “Are there any indications that there could be developmental difficulties?” The list could go on and on. And while we say that we don’t care what we have, so long as it’s a healthy baby, the truth is we have opinions and expectations on everything from the sex to the hair and eye color to the personality.( Ok, I’ll speak for myself) I  had opinions and expectations, expectations that my son would be born normally, safely, without complication. Expectations that he would be perfect in every way, even if I couldn’t articulate all the characteristics needed to make him perfect.

And then, life threw the switch that rerouted our train of expectations down an unfamiliar, scary track that forced Cathy and me to jettison our expectations just so we could stay on the rails.

When Cathy’s water broke and she was forced to rest in a hospital bed for the duration of her pregnancy, we had to pitch some of our expectations about how we would prepare for Grayson’s birth and when he would be born, but were able to hold onto most of the other ones.

When he was born 11 weeks prematurely, we had to jettison more of our expectations, such as how big he would be and how quickly he would come home. But even then, as a novice NICU parent, I had no idea just how foreign this track was to the one we had traveled with Ethan. As I watched my newborn son breathing on his own in the first minutes outside of the womb, with his little ribcage literally being sucked down towards his spine with every labored breath, all I could see was a little guy who had fight and was going to beat the odds. I couldn’t recognize the distress he was in. At that point, I still had the expectation that he would be stronger than most other kids born as prematurely as he had been; I still believed that his biggest issue would be the fingers that were fused together due to amniotic banding which would require a minor surgery. I was still able to hold onto my expectations that he would leave the hospital far earlier than most babies born under his circumstances.

The next couple days shook those expectations out of us. We got to the point where we couldn’t even expect that he would come home at all. Our image of perfection was marred by tubes and monitors and needles and troubling x-rays. This wasn’t the track we had anticipated, the one that, in hindsight, I suppose we had felt entitled to. After all, we’d prayed for Grayson since before he was ever conceived, we’d prayed for his health and protection throughout his gestation. In no way was this what we’d had in mind.

And yet, as I look back on the last month and a half of Grayson’s life, as I survey the broken track that our family has limped down, what looked so dark and foreboding heading in takes on an unexpected sweetness in hindsight. I think of the doctors and nurses that have become more than attendants – they’ve become friends and prayer warriors along with us (so many of Gray’s nurses have told us they are praying for him). I think of our family and friends who have supported us all along the way, helped us shoulder our emotional and physical burdens, and lifted up our son and our family in prayer throughout. I think of the way I celebrate what we had taken for granted with Ethan: that he can breathe on his own; that his ears and eyes are developing normally; that he can drink milk; that he continues to grow gram by gram, ounce by ounce. And I think of the way Grayson’s story and God’s faithfulness in the midst of the complications has reminded me (and others) that the goal of life isn’t becoming more comfortable and safe.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the purpose of life is to grow evermore intimately familiar with my creator and to learn how to walk with Him and to live a life that reflects His heart and love to a world that would rather deny His existence. Though I wouldn’t have chosen the path we’ve taken over these last couple months, though I would have preferred to avoid the emotional stress it’s placed on my family and loved ones, I can’t help but admit that it has drawn me much deeper into the arms of my Father God. I’ve learned to see the beauty in the broken track we’ve journeyed down; I’ve learned to celebrate the little blessings that we so often take for granted; and I’ve learned that often times my definition of perfection isn’t God’s definition. Because, as I look into my son’s deep blue eyes which are processing light months before they were designed to, as I hold his tiny hands which can grasp my finger even though bound by amniotic bands, and as I watch his chest rise and fall in spite of the abuse his lungs have taken over the first 45 days of his premature life, I see a gift from God that goes beyond the birth of my second son. I see a growing, breathing testimony to God’s grace. I see a living reminder that what the world holds up as perfection is often nothing more than the easy, comfortable track that allows us to be self-reliant.

So, no, my son may not be what we’d expected throughout the 6 months of his gestation, but he is the perfect gift from a loving God who cares far more about our character and spiritual maturity than He does our comfort. And I thank God for the broken track He allowed us to travel down, because it has impelled us to lean into Him rather than simply rest in our expectations.  Thank you, Father, for Grayson. May you continue to have your way with him.