She is Fierce

It feels like we picked the name Penelope forever ago. I mean, we’ve had a good five years to think about it. The name isn’t popular, we didn’t see it on a top baby names list, it’s not in honor of an ancestor or close family friend. But something about Penelope, Penny for short, just grabbed our hearts and squeezed.

We’ve dreamed about her. Imagined what she would be like. Jenny and I are both creative and outgoing, so we figured she would be, too.

When Jenny was a little girl, she decided her play kitchen needed an upgrade and made real chocolate pudding in the fake kitchen sink. When that got boring, she moved on to a game she dubbed “Bad Baby.” In this game, the aforementioned Bad Baby stuck her hands in the very real pudding and made very real, Jenny-sized chocolate handprints all over her light pink carpet. When her mom saw what Bad Baby had done, she gave Jenny cleaning supplies and told her she had to help clean up the mess.

“Ok! I’ll play Maid,” little Jenny exclaimed.

“No, you’ll play Little Girl Who’s in Trouble,” her mom replied, and sent her to sit at the kitchen for a timeout while she cleaned the carpet.

But sitting at a table also gets boring, and Jenny mindlessly grabbed a butter knife and carved a notch into the side of the table. Oh boy. She was in for it now. But wait, the notch wouldn’t stick out if the whole outer lip of the table was notched. Y’know, cause her mom wouldn’t remember that her kitchen table didn’t used to have a toddler-hand-etched pattern around it. Needless to say, when her mom finished cleaning up and saw what Bad Baby had done to her once un-etched kitchen table, she about blew a gasket.

Deflated, her mom sighed, “I hope some day you have a little girl just like you.”

Tiny little Jenny clasped her hands together and gasped.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me!”

Before Jenny’s c-section, we had to come face-to-face with the very real potential that we would never meet the little girl just like her. Preparing ourselves for the passing of our baby, who we’d been dreaming of for years, was the hardest thing Jenny and I have ever had to do. And now we have to do it every. single. day.

Don’t get me wrong, Penny is a fighter. My god, is she a fighter. To make sure we don’t forget that fact, the NICU and an organization called Gabe’s Gloves donated a tiny little pair of boxing gloves that hang on Penny’s incubator. They do this for every NICU baby at Northwestern. So many groups like this exist, formed from the passion these parents have for this place and the people that work there, tirelessly fighting to keep our tiny treasures around longer than they otherwise would have been.

The past three days have been a whirlwind of numbers, acronyms, and medical terms. Penny’s had so many liquids, nutrients, and gases pumped into a tube thinner than a spaghetti noodle that runs through her mouth, delicately into her esophagus. Countless doctors, technicians, nurses, and specialists meet every morning to decide which liquids to increase, which nutrients to supplement, which gases to pull back on in order to keep our precious little miracle alive.

We have to take things an hour at at a time right now. And while we make sure to celebrate each little win, we have to remind ourselves that for every step forward we’ll probably be taking two steps back. But when I look at those mini black boxing gloves, dangling from the side of my 11 oz daughter’s incubator, I’m reminded that Penny is a fighter, and every one of those hours, she’s in there fighting to stay with us.

The day Penny was born, our friend Jenn sent us a text with a quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It sums up our little fighter so aptly. I wrote it on the white board in our hospital room and the one next to Penny’s incubator so we’d always remember.

“Though she be but little, she is fierce.”