Hand-me-downs

I try not to oversentimentalize "stuff"...but I was particularly attached to this round of baby clothes. Three pairs of pink baby crib shoes! Three pink baby cashmere sweaters! Three of everything! The clothes seem so symbolic of the babies' first year struggling to survive. The 110 days in the NICU, all of the follow-up doctors' appointments, overnight hospital stays for pulmonary sleep studies, physical therapy, occupational therapist and early childhood interventionists visiting our home, relentless milk and feeding and bathing routines...that was an exhausting year filled with medical teams and oxygen tank deliveries and heart monitors going off in the middle of the night. Now that the "babies" have outgrown these clothes, I have everything in triplicate, and the memories that these clothes evoke are bittersweet, reminding me of the unknowns and anxieties that those first months of the girls' lives entailed. My friend Michaela just had the cutest little bundle, baby girl Ivy Kardelen, and (despite my unhealthy attachment to these cute little sleepers and shirts and pants and sweaters and shoes) I shipped two big boxes of beautiful, sentimental baby clothes to Utah. Maybe little Ivy will like some of the hand-me-downs from her Nebraska baby friends, Maria, Frances, and Margaret!