The Ride Home

Mira is catheterized every four hours, and fed every three. Our ride home is 2-3 hours long depending on traffic and things like that. This gave us a very small window of opportunity to leave the hospital without knowing we would have to stop in cath her or feed her during the ride home. At 6am and 6pm is the only time her cathing and feeding schedule overlap, leaving us a three hour window before her next feeding at 9. When I called Joe, I let him know that we had to be leaving the hospital right after her 6pm cathing and feeding so we could make it home without having to disturb her. That almost worked out as planned...
Mira has no control of her bowels. I know you're probably thinking "what baby does", but it's a little different with her. The nerves controlling her bowels are either non-existent or compromised temporarily or permanently. Only time will tell. But because of this, any time she gets upset, tenses, moves in the right/wrong way, sneezes, hiccups, etc. she poops. Sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. So, at about quarter to 6, I set things up to do her cath. This turned into me standing there leaning against the crib for over a half an hour, with my head resting in one palm, while I used my other hand to just hold a wipe over her butt while she pooped over and over again. You can't cath while she's pooping because since she has to be on her belly, the poop runs right over her little pea bug (what we call girl parts in our household). So if you cath while she's pooping, you would get poop in the pea bug, and probably give her an infection. No good. So we have to learn a lot patience when cathing her because with her not having control of her bowels, diaper changes and cathing can often create an entire load of laundry and take ten times longer than you anticipate.
Since cathing took so long, I didn't start feeding her until almost 6:30. So she was still eating until almost 7. Joe and the nurse packed up all my breast milk in bins with ice (4 bins, if you don't mind me bragging a little bit!) while I continued to get Mira ready to go. She has to be on a monitor at home, so I hooked her up to our monitor and unhooked her from all the hospital monitors (yay!). We put her in her car bed (a special car seat for babies that have to be on their belly), and at about 7:20, finally made it down to our car!
We packed up the car, loaded up Mira, I sat with her in the back, and we hit the road! We made pretty good time considering we left almost an hour late. We got home at around 9:30, and Joe immediately started feeding her while I set up her cathing stuff because she was going to be due to cath at 10pm. We cut it close, but luckily she enjoyed the ride, so she was fine with being fed a half an hour late.
We were a little off schedule, and it was weird having her out in the open world after having her confined to an incubator most of her life thus far, but I was thrilled when we pulled into our driveway!