Turtles and Thanksgiving

When I first looked down the upstairs hall and saw this I thought, “There’s a turtle in the hallway.”

We don’t have a pet turtle.

Things have been so absolutely nutty around here since late September that seeing a turtle loose in my upstairs hall didn’t even raise an alarm in mid-October.

I crept down the hall, sort of on my tiptoes, so as not to disturb him (because he would what- bolt?) and upon closer inspection discovered that he was not in fact a turtle but a partially deflated black balloon leftover from my younger daughter’s birthday.

That made so much more sense.

Things calmed down for a few hours one Saturday morning late in October, and then our older daughter called with a belly ache. I chalked it up to general pregnancy malaise since she was 27 weeks along, but within a few hours I was with her and her husband in her delivery room when they wheeled her out for an emergency c-section.

Little Baby Fighter is one month old today and I simultaneously marvel at how fast and how slow it’s gone. As the only person permitted in the NICU besides his parents, I try to visit him as much as possible. And as his Mimi, I am on a need-to-know basis on many of the details so I am instead left with my uneducated view, fascinated and a little intimidated by all the many many interventions helping him to stay focused on growth and maturity rather than on temperature regulation, nutrition, or air humidity.

We are an incredibly blessed human race, equipped by God to have our own thoughts and skills, skills that lead to amazing inventions that help grow a premature baby until he’s ready to face this world on his own. Other equally impressive God-given abilities can wreck havoc and end a life (either in utero or out). God has given us so much power.

This Thanksgiving, I am so deeply grateful for the nurses, doctors, therapists, and practitioners that are providing care for my newest wee grand baby. I am grateful they are using their skills in such a life-honoring way, and that I get to benefit so richly from their expertise.

(I’m also grateful we didn’t have a runaway turtle in the upstairs hall. It’s all relative.)