Heavy's Slideshow

We are so thankful to those who took care of us while Heavy was entering and exiting this world.  Kathrine, my midwife is amazing!  She has been with me for the births of all of our babies, I love her more fully than I can put into words. Kathrine had arranged wonderful nurses who would work well with our family given our situation, in fact I think one of our nurses was an angel in disguise, her name was Tiki.  She took around 300 pictures of Heavy and did lots of video taping for us (along with another nurse named Lori).

Peter and I were able to spend around 9 and half hours with Heavy after he passed.  During that time we were able to give him a bath, do hand and foot prints, take foot impressions, snip a lock of his dark silky hair and just love our boy.  Tiki was with us for around 6 of those 9-ish hours.  It is amazing how powerful experiences can draw people together, Tiki feels like family to us, like family to Heavy.  Next to his parents, Heavy's body spent the most time with her.

Heavy was born at 9:27 pm on Sunday, we were moved to our recovery room around 3:30am.  Kathrine had made arrangements for us to be in a room next to parents who have children in the NICU.  By around 4:30 am Peter and I crawled into the twin hospital bed, pulled up the bed rails on either side and placed our son, bathed and wrapped in the blanket given to him by his cousin Anabelle, and then wrapped in the fuzzy white blanket we purchased just for him in June, between us.  With our arms around each other and our sweet baby we dozed.

Leaving the hospital with empty arms was a fear of ours.  How would we know when we would be ready to leave our son behind? I had a hard time falling asleep, instead I closed my eyes, caressed Heavy's hair, placed our checks together and sang to him, by the time sleep overcame me it was around 5:30am.  I was stirred around 6:15am, I looked at our son and it was so clear that what was nestled between Peter and I was a shell.  (This clarity was an answer to prayer) I woke Peter up and we agreed that it was time to say good-bye and I love you.  We were not able to take him down to the morgue, so we called the best person we could think of... Tiki.  Before her shift was over at 7am, she came to our room, and we lovingly placed him in her arms.

Tiki gave us a wonderful gift.  Not only did she take care of us and our son with a pure love, but also created for us a keepsake we will treasure forever, our slideshow.

Enjoy meeting Heavy and catching but a glimpse of our time with him.

** I cannot figure out how to embed the video into our blog, below is the link to the video on vimeo**

vimeo.com/15829300