Spending five weeks at home with a three month-old, my first child, taught me so much about myself, about my wife, and about what's to come for me as a father and as a writer.

But before I tell you how I got through it—let me tell you how I got there. 

Five months in, five weeks spent at home with her, and you get better at it. You learn. You react. You try and remember for next time. You correct people when they call what you did babysitting. You think you’ll never be able to do this again. You can’t wait to do it again. You force yourself to relive the moments that you just put your head down and got through, the terms you learned to use (oxygen levels, lumbar puncture, antibiotics course), because the doctor warned you that in the not too-distant future, where I write from now, that the room in the N.I.C.U, the nights, the days, marking papers in the unit break room, that it would all be forgotten, as if it hadn’t happened.

And while the memory of those moments still bottom my stomach out, I keep myself in that place from time to time, relive the tears, the new level of heartache I’ve come to understand, because I don’t want to forget.

It did happen.

The following is reproduced from a spiral notebook, on which, in the top left corner of the yellow cover, is written in my wife’s handwriting LUNA NOTES. Inside the cover, a couple of emergency telephone numbers. The first page, back and front, is an outline of what a normal day in Luna’s life consisted of when she was 3 months old. The book was for my mom to use as a guide while she watched Luna the week my wife went back to work, which was also my last week at work before spending 5 weeks at home with the baby.

That week ended and my five weeks began. I was on the clock. That morning, I decided I would record as much as possible (the original plan was to take copious notes every day). I've edited for coherence only in the most extreme instances and for punctuation/formatting consistency.

I married a woman who on Monday, April 8th, 2013, two hours after an almost-but-not-quite-emergency cesarean section, performed because of worsening chorioamnionitis, instructed the Recovery nurses to bring her down in a wheelchair to the N.I.C.U. so that she could begin breastfeeding her daughter.

You’re not allowed out of bed yet, they cried.

Well then starting pushing the bed, she said.

Inside our room in the N.I.C.U., I heard the doors open to the unit, the staff-only doors, and I knew it was her. Then I heard her voice. It was Danielle and she was decidedly not dead.

Recently, I’ve come to realize that my life, at least for the foreseeable future, is going to be defined by my family and my writing career. And that’s due to two factors:

1. My wife and I working our asses off.
2. My realization that at some point, you just have to decide that something Is, rather than wait for it to Be.

I’ve been waiting for this moment. And that’s been the problem. Waiting isn’t the same as creating, isn’t the same as drawing up a plan, taking pause to reflect on the outcomes, and then just taking action.

This is me taking action.