Blog
Navigating Your NICU Baby’s Feeding Journey
This article is sponsored by Prolacta Bioscience. Navigating the feeding journey with your NICU baby can be challenging. When you have a baby in the NICU, feeding can look very different, both in how you feed your baby and what you feed your baby. And as a key member...
Mental Health in the NICU: Barriers to Treatment & the Effect on the Whole Family
Any NICU parent will tell you that having a baby in the NICU is a stressful situation. And the research is behind us on that claim. Research has shown that NICU parents experience higher levels of stress than typical parents of healthy, term babies. When it comes...
Give a Meaningful Gift This Mother’s Day
"You are the mother everyone wishes they had." Mother's Day can be an especially emotional time for NICU parents, parents of preemies, and those who have suffered a loss. Some will be celebrating at home with their newly-discharged baby. Some are years out from...
Emerging from Prognosis
I understand that doctors try to give families an honest warning in a prognosis, yet it only gives us one potential outcome. Parents share the discrepancies between prognosis and reality all the time. We learn later that prognosis will not give us the big picture...
Thrown in Deep, Far from the Edge: Emerging as Parents of Micro Preemies
When I was pregnant, I remember reading about classes for new parents-to-be. There were options like Caring for Your Newborn, or Caring for your Newborn Twins, or Breastfeeding 101. I definitely don’t remember any offerings called Caring for your Micro Preemies....
Prematurity and the Myth of “It’s Good for Their Immune System”
One thing parents of preemies and NICU babies hear often from well-meaning friends, family and even strangers is, "Don't be so overprotective about germs! It's good for their immune system!" Unfortunately this manner of thinking is dangerous and can put your baby...
Finding Peace When Life Feels Out of Control
by Karri Friedenberger When something traumatic happens to a person or a family you often hear about them adjusting to their "new normal." One finds their new rhythm in life, adjusting their sails and moving forward. In February 2001 our twin girls, Hanna and...
Connections While Quarantined, Part II: Isolation at Home
As someone who has always been very connected to people – and who regularly connects others to people and resources – I found being a new parent of micro preemies very isolating: hospitalized bed rest, having twins, stopping full time work, spending the first three...
Addressing Unconscious Bias in the NICU
Prematurity does not discriminate. Women of every race, religion and socioeconomic background experience premature birth of their babies every year. But black women in the United States experience disproportionate and unacceptable poor maternal health outcomes. A...
Connections While Quarantined, Part I: Isolation in the NICU
As someone who has always been very connected to people – and who regularly connects others to people and resources – I found being a new parent of micro preemies very isolating: hospitalized bed rest; having twins; stopping full time work; spending the first three...
The Gift of Gratitude
I just assumed that when I was ready to have a baby, I would. I had no reason to believe that getting pregnant would pose any difficulty for me. I was relatively young, healthy and had no untreated medical issues. But I was wrong. Like many other women, pregnancy...