March 6, 2017

Finding out you're pregnant when you're trying to have a baby is pretty much like being given a luxuriously wrapped birthday present 10 months early and being told not to open it until the day of. To cope with the torture of waiting, you imagine all sorts of fun and awesome things to come: the name you'll pick for your baby, the matching outfits you'll both wear, the nursery you'll decorate, all the adorable monthly photoshoots you'll organize to capture the inevitable cuteness, and the overall non-stop joy of holding the tiny human you helped create. The picture your mind paints of your impending parenthood is always a bright one. You almost never take into account the many other things that can happen that can tarnish that. You never picture that there could be something wrong with your baby, that everything might not be the shiny, perfect picture you'd planned it as.

My son Jasper was born with an incredibly rare heart defect, one that we couldn’t possibly have known about in advance. We found out about it two days after his birth, when he was admitted into the NICU after a difficult experience with breastfeeding — he couldn’t eat because he was too busy gasping for air. As it turns out, a part of his heart was somewhere it shouldn’t be, and it was causing him significant problems.

Read the whole article here:
https://www.romper.com/p/my-sons-open-heart-surgery-made-me-realize-just-how-strong-i-am-42193

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