Party of Five

First of all, thank you for reading this!  Second, thank you so much for all of your prayers, encouragement, and support.  God is truly good and we are so incredibly blessed to have such a wonderful support network of family and friends.  A special thank you to my sweet "cousin" (okay, my cousin's wife) Elizabeth for the beautiful crosses that are staying in the room with the babies!  I thought this picture of them captured it all!  Hopefully, this blog will give us a chance to keep all of you updated on Cooper and Kinley's progress through their NICU journey.  I promise I will try and keep these updates as short and to the point as possible, but if you know me at all, you know I love to talk and I'm sure at times I will get carried away!  Of course, this first one will be the longest to give you the "back story", then I will post a second entry to update you on the status of the babies.  So, if you already know "our story", you can skip this on and go onto the next post!


Cooper Thomas and Kinley Marie made their debut into this world on July 23, 2012 at 7:26am and 7:33am respectively at a gestational age of 26 weeks, 6 days.  Cooper weighed in at 2 pounds 9 ounces and 14 1/2 inches long (the neonatologist called him ginormous) and Kinley at 1 pound 12 ounces and 13 inches long.  For those of you who may be out of the loop, my wonderful sister, Rachel selflessly was our gestational surrogate (meaning biologically, the babies are ours) and carried these sweet babies for me and Brian.  I cannot begin to express how wonderful she handled everything from the beginning stages of IVF to the delivery. She is truly a special person and continues to be a very special part of Cooper and Kinley's lives.


We had a little bit of a rocky journey from the beginning of the pregnancy.  At about 13 weeks, Rachel had a large sub-chorionic hemorrhage (bleed) and we thought she may miscarry.  Luckily, that resolved, but then at about 19 weeks, she started having pre-term contractions and was diagnosed with a short cervix and placed on bed rest.  All was going well until July 18, just a day passed 26 weeks, when her water broke.  We immediately went to Methodist Willowbrook and they transferred us to Texas Children's (TCH).  She was given a full course of steroids to aid in lung development as well as a full course of magnesium sulfate to protect their brains.  We are incredibly thankful we had enough time for both of these "treatments". We were told that though her water had broken, it was possible to stay pregnant for months (though the average is about 1 week) and their plan was to keep her at TCH until she went into labor.


Rachel did well for about 4-5 days until the evening of the 21st when she started to have more intense contractions.  Even so, she was only having about 1-2 contractions per hour and they told us not to worry since they don't consider it labor until they are regular and at least 10 minutes apart.  She continued this trend all day on the 22nd and into the early hours of Monday morning, the 23rd.  She had one contraction around 5:45am, another around 6:45am, then 6:55am, then 7:03am.  At 7:03, I went to tell the nurse who said she would come get her on the monitor to measure them.  Rachel got up to go to the bathroom (since a full bladder can sometimes trigger contractions), and at that point could feel Cooper's head.  Of course, I ran to get the nurse and everything past that point is a huge blur.  Alarms were pulled, and a huge medical team was at her bedside in minutes.  At first, they were preparing to deliver Cooper in the antepartum room, luckily, he receded and they were able to get her down to the Labor and Delivery OR where he was born almost immediately (with no epidural for Rachel).  They then discovered Kinley was breech and had to perform an emergency C-section with Rachel under general anesthesia.  I was present for Cooper's birth, but because of the general anesthesia, was in the waiting room for Kinley.  Brian, had just dropped Caleb off at daycare when I called to tell him the babies were on their way and arrived shortly after they were born, but we were together for the first time we got to really see them.  Of course our first thoughts, like everyone who meets them, were that they were so small....but at the same time so incredibly perfect!  We were now a family of five and beginning our NICU journey with our precious little miracles God has blessed us with!