Playing dress-up with babies is one of the best parts of being a NICU nurse. As long and exhausting as the night shifts can be, I always looked forward to "bath-night" at the NICU at home, which most often involved less of a bath and more of a get-the-baby-onto-the-scale-and-back-into-a freshly-made-bed-as-quickly-as-possible-without-letting-his-sats-drop-uncomfortably-low. However, there was that one perk of getting to choose a matching receiving blanket, hat, crib sheet, and if you were really lucky and your baby was stable enough to get dressed, sleeper. Simple pleasures.
It isn't quite the same here. Unfortunately, there aren't as many old ladies around knitting us multi-coloured toques for our infants. And, I have yet to see a nice receiving blanket so I can properly bundle a baby the way every good NICU nurse desires to do.
But tonight, at the very bottom of a large pile of adult hospital blankets in a cart on D ward, I found a Bob the Builder blanket, which has the same general thickness and consistency of the receiving blankets of my dreams. I brought the blanket into the ICU and introduced mama to the North American phenomenon of Bob the Builder. The blanket was potentially meant to be a wall-hanging, but Greg's mama liked it. So, my little one got wrapped in a frighteningly large replica of a cartoon construction worker. Within minutes, baby Greg was settled and had long forgotten his intense desire to remove the pesky tube from his trachea.
I looked over at mama and saw an uncharacteristically large smile on her face.
"Bob is a handsome man" she said. "Greg is a handsome baby. They should be together".
And together they are. Sleep well baby Greg. In the arms of our good friend Bob the Builder.
Playing dress-up with babies is one of the best parts of being a NICU nurse. As long and exhausting as the night shifts can be, I always looked forward to "bath-night" at the NICU at home, which most often involved less of a bath and more of a get-the-baby-onto-the-scale-and-back-into-a freshly-made-bed-as-quickly-as-possible-without-letting-his-sats-drop-uncomfortably-low. However, there was that one perk of getting to choose a matching receiving blanket, hat, crib sheet, and if you were really lucky and your baby was stable enough to get dressed, sleeper. Simple pleasures.
It isn't quite the same here. Unfortunately, there aren't as many old ladies around knitting us multi-coloured toques for our infants. And, I have yet to see a nice receiving blanket so I can properly bundle a baby the way every good NICU nurse desires to do.
But tonight, at the very bottom of a large pile of adult hospital blankets in a cart on D ward, I found a Bob the Builder blanket, which has the same general thickness and consistency of the receiving blankets of my dreams. I brought the blanket into the ICU and introduced mama to the North American phenomenon of Bob the Builder. The blanket was potentially meant to be a wall-hanging, but Greg's mama liked it. So, my little one got wrapped in a frighteningly large replica of a cartoon construction worker. Within minutes, baby Greg was settled and had long forgotten his intense desire to remove the pesky tube from his trachea.I looked over at mama and saw an uncharacteristically large smile on her face.
"Bob is a handsome man" she said. "Greg is a handsome baby. They should be together".
And together they are. Sleep well baby Greg. In the arms of our good friend Bob the Builder.