Session 8
In this session of our travel blog, we aren’t covering many miles, less than ten actually, but it was a giant step for our family. After having successfully navigated an entire week’s vacation hundreds of miles from home, we realized how we had failed to introduce our daughter to many everyday activities. One that really stood out in my mind was the delightful childhood pastime: trick-r-treating.
Our daughter’s first Halloween was spent in the NICU. We snapped a picture of our one-month-old wearing a pumpkin cap and booties to commemorate the holiday, but quickly removed them since she didn’t care much for wearing accessories. Holidays in the hospital are not exactly ideal, so the day wasn’t really any different than our typical day. For her second Halloween, we dressed our girl in the strawberry costume that her grandma made but decided against bringing her trick-r-treating because the weather was cold, and we happened to have a nurse scheduled that afternoon. So once again, she didn’t celebrate Halloween with the typical fanfare.
Thankfully, for her third Halloween the weather was quite pleasant to introduce our daughter to trick-r-treating. Her cousin, who is just four months older, dressed as Bam Bam, and our little girl was Pebbles. We took our Flintstone characters, along with our other daughters dressed as Belle and Minnie Mouse, along the quiet streets of our little part of the world to solicit candy from our neighbors. Though she was two, our daughter couldn’t walk yet, in fact, she couldn’t even sit up independently, so we kept her in the double stroller for our walk. We had only used the stroller a handful of times (aside from doctor appointments) since bringing it home with us from the NICU. We kept our daughter in the seat closest to the handle, while her ventilator, suction machine, and “Go-bag” occupied the front seat.
The day was a success and her sisters loved getting all the extra candy. (Our Trachie couldn’t eat candy and was still nourished through a g-tube.) Participating in the “normal” activities of daily life often doesn’t look “normal” for our family, but we were thrilled to be carving out our new normal and enjoying life.
For the longest time, we opted to divide and conquer life. One parent would take the older girls to events, while the other stayed home with our trach- and vent-dependent child since taking her out was more complicated. It was so rewarding to finally be enjoying life as a whole family and introducing our medically fragile daughter to the wide world.
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