November Baby

Last night at 12:27am we welcomed into the world, very unexpectedly, a precious, perfect little miracle who we named Abigaile Grace. Abigaile for "The Father's Joy" and "Grace" for the grace of God. She was born at 23 weeks, 1 day of gestation, just barely considered viable and the age that the wonderful doctors and nurses of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit here at Children's Hospital St. Paul would do everything in their power to keep her alive at such a delicate age. She came out kicking her legs (Luke gave me the play-by-play since he could peek over the curtain during my C-section), and for the next many hours, they worked on stabilizing her, via breathing tubes, chest tubes, IV's, and all sorts of other things I can go into more detail on later. I got to see her for the first time at 4:00am. Beautiful!

At 9:00am or so, we got an urgent call from the NICU team to come down right away because they were doing CPR on Abbie. 5 minutes before that, I would have told you it would take me a good half hour to get out of my bed. Give a worried, loving mama that kind of call, and you have never seen a post-C-section woman move so fast in all your life. I was in the wheelchair in less than 2 minutes, and we headed down to see our daughter. When we arrived, the neonatologist told us they had been attempting CPR for upwards of 5 minutes and Abbie was not responding. Even if they were able to resuscitate her at this time, the risk of permanent brain damage were very, very high, and she told us she thought this was Abbie's way of saying her organs were just too little to survive outside of mama's womb.  Her recommendation was to stop the resuscitation attempts, and we consented.

Immediately now we got to hold our precious little girl. We spent two hours with her before she ended up going off into the arms of Jesus. We sang to her, talked to her, told her how much we loved her, and Luke even gave her a sponge bath. She was one loved baby in those short couple of hours. She has been, and is even now, The Father's Joy, and she is rocking in the arms of her Heavenly Father where we will see her again one day. And, we like to think that Jesus will also give her lots of time to be rocked and loved on by Grandpa Dave, who preceded her journey to heaven by 5 1/2 years. He hasn't gotten to hold a grandbaby yet, and he loves babies, so now he will help care for her until we meet again one day!

Our family sincerely appreciates all your prayers, love, and support, and we will provide more detail on this blog over the next days and weeks, to fill in the missing information from this initial post and to answer any questions.

Love and blessings,
Kristy and Luke Christenson