My favourite NICU photos

Recently on the Li’l Aussie Prems website there was a thread where people posted their favourite NICU photograph(s). There were a lot of beautiful photographs.

I found it hard to choose only one, and in the end chose four.

This is her perfect little foot on day 3, the day of her lowest weight (795g).

Avoiding the paparazzi.

Our fingers touching. She is one month old. This photo is slightly out of focus and I intended to try and take it again, but without warning she graduated from the humidicrib to an open cot.

Guess who’s cycling off CPAP and just pulled her feeding tube out again? This is our first photo of her smile.

On a related note - I recommend you take lots of photos AND make a backup copy.  I lost many of my early photos of Talia when my hard drive failed a few months after she came home and I had no backup.

Photographing and scrapbooking your NICU experience

I love Talia’s NICU photos, looking back on them now. I wish I had more of them, and I really wish I had some video. I don’t think I realised at the time how important they would become, because when I was spending so much of every day in the nursery, I felt as though every detail would be burned into my brain forever. Unfortunately, you do start to forget the little details so every photos is precious - especially the size comparison photos, and the few of me holding Talia. Sadly I lost a lot of my hospital photos last year due to a computer failure - so be sure to create a back up of any photos you take.

I know there are mums who can hardly bear to look at their hospital photos, showing their baby looking so small and struggling to hold on to life - but it is better to have the photos and choose not to look at them, than not to have them at all. One day your child may also want to know more about how their life started and how amazingly far they have come.

The KEMH nurses were quite good at giving me little items to keep - things like hospital bands, a tiny blood pressure cuff, monitor leads, the little paper tape they use to measure head circumference and so on. They also made me a card for Mothers Day with Talia’s footprints in it, and so forth. All these precious little souvenirs are in a special memory box which I dip into from time to time.

I’m not really a scrapbooker, although I’ve done a bit of digital scrapbooking. However I know a lot of people like to create baby pages, and if you want something special, here is a site which offers stickers and other scrapbooking stuff specifically for premature babies. http://www.mykidsinspiration.com/shop/index.php
The only drawback is that they call premmies “preemies” in the US.

The photos in this post are a couple of my digital scrapbooking pages, they are part of a photo book I made of Talia’s first year. (They don’t actually use anythings specifically for prems, other than my actual photos.) You can see scrapbooking done by other premmie mums on the L’il Aussie Prems forum here.