Baby K

Last Thursday started out just like any other. Josh and I were both at work, doing our thing. I typically don’t keep my cell phone on me at work because a) it distracts me, and b) I spend all day walking around a hospital which = major germs. So at lunchtime that day I checked my phone and saw I had a missed call and voicemail from DSS. I immediately called them back, and they asked if we were interesed in becoming foster parents for a little preemie born at 26 weeks!!! The funny thing is, he is actually in the NICU in the hospital where I work, so at the time of the phone call I was literally just a few floors above him.

I made a plan to meet the social worker at 5pm that night to go visit the baby. We will call him “Baby K.” Unfortunately Josh wasn’t able to get off work in time to join me, but I asked the nurse and social worker lots of questions and took a few photos to show Josh. That night we discussed it, but we were both kind of shell-shocked and really on the fence. We have a lot going on this year and weren’t sure if we would be able to adequately care for a preemie on top of everything else. We decided to pray about it and sleep on it.

Fast forward to Friday evening, when Josh and I both went to the hospital to visit Baby K together. We did an hour of skin-to-skin (or “kangaroo care”), talked to him, played him lullabies, and got lots of information from his nurse and nurse practitioner. One piece of really good news is that his cranial ultrasound came back negative, meaning no brain bleeds! Yay!! Towards the end of our visit it was just kind of unspoken that we were going to foster Baby K. At one point Josh said something like, “Next time when we come…” and I was like wait, what do you mean next time?! But I think we both knew in our hearts that, for some reason, God was calling us to care for this child. And that was that.

Like any foster care situation, we have pretty much zero idea what this will look like long-term. This could end up being for a week, a month, a year… we have no clue! According to the nurse practitioner, the absolute earliest he would be discharged from the hospital would be in about 8 weeks. A lot of that depends on how he is breathing and eating. He still has a ways to go in those areas, but he has already overcome so much and I just know that he will continue to progress. Our hope is that even if we are only his foster parents for a short amount of time, we can spend that time advocating for him, loving him, holding him, and just in general trying to give him a better start in life.

So- please pray for sweet Baby K! And for us, that we can do what is needed to support this child! More updates to come. 🙂