The NICU takes photos of the babies to keep a NICU diary of each of them. I wanted to show you what God has done in their little lives!

Here are the babies on their first day. It’s hard to even find Zach under all that equipment, so you’ll have to look at Marissa’s photo to get your bearings. They are wearing a CPAP machine to help their breathing, have an IV in their tiny hands, a feeding tube up their noses, and are under warmers to help maintain their body heat. They also have stick-on leads on their chests to keep track of their hearts and respiratory cycles. They wheeled in my hospital bed for a short visit and I just reached out and touched their tiny beds in my groggy state. You are looking straight down at Zach with his chin on the left, and the wide blue stripe across his tiny forehead.

By late Day 2, the CPAP machines were removed. Here are the babies on Day 3, with their IVs and feeding tubes. Marissa no longer needed the warmer and moved to their crib, but Zach had trouble maintaining his temperature, so they put him back under his.
You can see tiny needle marks in his hands where his IV used to be (it’s in his right arm in this picture). They finally had to move it to the top of his head so that he couldn’t pull it out. Apparently, he has my horrible veins… really easy to see until you go in to find one and then they disappear. I was stuck in 3 places and several times per place to get mine inserted!

On Day 4, they got down to just their feeding tubes and Zach’s IV (seen here on the top of his little head). All 3 of us had our IVs removed on Day 4: Marissa, first, then mommy, then Zach. And Zach moved into the crib with Marissa permanently and started making great progress. He was always so concerned-looking when he heard babies crying at the NICU because he couldn’t see his sister and didn’t know if she was okay. We put them right together in the crib and find them scooted even closer together later. They are so aware of each other and it’s beautiful.

On Day 5, they had their feeding tubes removed! You have seen the pictures of them since then.

On Day 8, yesterday, we had a very painful day for everyone with Zach’s circumcision, blood draws from both of them (as if he hasn’t been through enough, they weren’t able to test his first draw, so they had to take his again last night after I posted). He is so strong, but it is definitely time to just let him recover!  This morning, Day 9, we took pictures of some much needed cuddling time. We usually put them back in their cribs right away to get them the most sleep possible, but yesterday and today we just rocked with them. Marissa saves her most expressive faces for when Matt is holding her– he gets the biggest smiles and the most tongue stick-outs from her 🙂 And Zach just snuggled with me and we talked about what a great job he has done getting through all of this. We are so very proud of both of them!

God has been so good to us!  What sweet, wonderful, awe-inspiring babies He created especially for our family!