Home from the Hospital

Well, it apparently has been decided that we needed to have a good story to tell Austin (when he’s old enough to understand) about his first day home from the hospital.



It's been a long 24 hours. Whitney was completely unable to rest in that awful hospital. Every five minutes some staffer was coming in to empty trash, to mop floors, to ask for her meal order, to have us fill out paperwork, to ask unnecessary questions, etc, etc, etc. On top of that, the Dr that does the circumcisions showed up last night instead of today as he was scheduled to. Needless to say, little Austin was less than comfortable last night. Bottom line, Whitney never got to sleep more than about 15 minutes at a stretch. After all she has been through, we couldn't keep her in that awful place anymore.

So we notified the nurse that we were going home TODAY, not Tuesday.

It took about six hours to get all the checkups done on mama and Austin before they would release us, but finally we drove away around 1PM.

So the good news is, we're home! The bad news is, about 45 minutes after we got here, we were hit with a tremendous thunderstorm (i'm talking sideways rain here) for about 45 minutes, and as a result we lost power around 3 PM. It's now 7:30 PM, and still no power. The recorded line says they expect to have power restored by 10 PM. Needless to say, we're keeping our fingers crossed.

But even with the power off, we're still glad to be home. Already Whitney has gotten to sleep uninterrupted for nearly two hours, and we'll send her back to bed once little Austin has finished feeding.


The storm did a lot of damage. Something like 190,000 people in our county are out of power. Unfortunately, the storm didn’t do much to get the temperature down, so last night we were sitting in a 90+ degree, 70% humidity house with no air conditioning and a newborn baby. As darkness closed in, I went out in search of food for everyone. I had to drive FIVE MILES to get out of blackness and to a shopping center that had power. Needless to say, the place was PACKED. There was no bagged ice to be found anywhere, so I went to the only McDonald’s and waited in line for 40 minutes to get food and brought it home. By then it was dark and we were working by candlelight.

The drive through miles of blackness made it clear that we would not be getting power back anytime soon. With no relief from the heat, it was time to get everyone to a hotel. I tried several only to find that either they didn’t have power either, or that they were full with people like us who needed respite from the heat.

Whitney had a great idea to try the hotels near BWI airport, and it payed off…we got a room reserved at the Embassy Suites. It turned out it was their next-to-last room available. So Whitney, Austin and Linda and I all packed up and drove 35 miles to the airport. We finally settled in to the room at around 11PM and fed/changed Austin. Linda and I slept in shifts so that Whitney could FINALLY get more than 15 minutes sleep at a time.

We awoke this morning and checked with our neighbors, still no power. We’ve extended the room for another night and are keeping our fingers crossed for power restoral before tomorrow afternoon. We are in MUCH better shape than we were yesterday, with both Whitney and Linda getting some decent sleep for the first time in days.