She's WHAT?! Coming Home??

Yes, it's true.  As I arrived at the hospital this morning, I found a voicemail message from Lisa, one of our favorite nurses, telling me that Clare had done so well with her on-demand feeding that the nurse practitioners were hoping Tim and I could "room in" at the hospital tonight (to-NIGHT?! I thought) with the plan to send her home (send her HOME?! I thought) tomorrow (ok, so you know what I thought next).

This was amazing news!  But we weren't at all expecting it.  And this wasn't an ideal day.  You see, we didn't have a number of the things we needed for Clare--you know, those things like diapers, a diaper genie, bottles.  And her room is still a mad disaster.  And the car seat was supposed to arrive via Fed Ex TODAY.  Oh, and then there was the important meeting I had at 10am at work, so I could begin learning the new athletic director part of my job. How could I miss that?  But most inconvenient of all, Tim had ridden the bus up to his AP workshop in Bellevue and wasn't due back to the Tacoma transit station until after 5pm.  Oh my...oh dear...where to begin?  I called Mark and he would reschedule our meeting.  I'm so grateful for his understanding.  I drove up to Bellevue and got Tim.  He'd been busily trying to reach his administrators to make sure that the district wouldn't expect us to pay for the part of his AP workshop that he'd be missing.  We then stopped at that awful big-box bastion of American consumerism, Babies R Us, to pick up those essentials.  Then we went home to wait for the Fed Ex guy...who didn't show up, because the seat didn't arrive in Portland until 4:41pm.  

So now Tim and I sit on the fold-out bed in one of the rooming-in rooms at TG, watching the Comedy Channel, with a little swaddled baby between us.  In less than an hour, we'll take her back to the ICN for her first bath.  We figure this is our first family vacation, and probably the only "trip" we'll take this summer.  I mean, really, this place has everything a hotel has.  And the bill goes to Premera-Blue Cross.

Tim and I are stupified, freaked out, exhausted with anticipation, filled with wonder, and scared to death.  Did I mention freaked out?