Remembering Parkers Birth

Happy Birthday Parker! Parker turned 3 years old a week ago on February 24th. I can't believe that he is already getting so big! He is such a smart little guy and has already learned all of his alphabet letters along with the sounds that they make! Most of you know Parker was born 8 weeks premature and weighed 2 pds 9 ounces and was 15.25" long. I had what is called Interuterine Growth Restriction and Pre-eclampsia with him (and also Payton, but it was much worse with Parker) which basically means that the Placenta stops feeding the baby-the Placenta essentially starts to die. The Doctor had me go to the Timpanogas Hosital to get a non-stress test done at 32 weeks and they weren't getting the results that they needed in order for me to leave, so after about 3 hours of trying, the doctor ordered me to have a full ultrasound. By this point Ben had just gotten there and was really worried. I still thought that everything was fine and that the baby was just sleeping. Anyways, at the ultrasound we found out that his body measured 26 weeks and his head measured 29 weeks-since he was 32 weeks, this was obviously not good. While waiting to hear from the Doctor, I went in to wait and put the blood pressure cuff back on and my blood pressure had sky rocketed! I couldn't believe it! The nurse came in and said that they were admitting me for at least 24 hours for a urinealysis while they waited for some blood tests to come back. Finally the Doctor called and said that I had to have the baby today and that it was not possible for me to have it at Timpanogas since it did not have a NICU. My insurance wouldn't allow me to have it at Utah Valley, so they flew me up to Salt Lake to St. Marks Hospital. I ended up having Parker by C-section a few hours later but since I had high blood pressure and was on magnesium, I was on bed rest for at least 24 hours. I saw Parker for a few seconds right before they whisked him away to the NICU. That was at 5am and I didn't get to see him until the following day at 2pm. It was so sad! It is really hard to tell from the pictures, but he was really so small and so skinny. For the first few days they only let us hold him 1 time and it was just for about a minute. Then once he was stablized, they let us hold him once a day for 30 minutes. There were a couple of days when he wasn't doing well that we weren't able to hold him at all. He stayed at the hospital for 5 1/2 weeks and we brought him home on conference Saturday. It's funny-our goal was to have him home by conference and we did-there were definitely days when we didn't think that that was possible. These first 2 pictures are of him within the first few days of being born. I tried to find the best pictures of him-some of them were pretty scary looking! The second one is really one of the only ones that we had of him without any tubes, etc on his face. We took that picture right before they put the feeding tube down him as well as put the permanent oxygen tubes up his nose. The one with the green binkie is on the first day that we brought him home. By then he weighed 4 pds 10 ounces. By that point he seemed so big and chubby to me, but I guess that he was still really small. There were definitely a lot of ups and downs throughout his stay at the hospital, but you would never know by looking at him today that he was ever a preemie! He is definitely our miracle baby!

This first picture was the picture for his birth announcement and it was taken when he was 4 months old.