I must confess that I have been procrastinating this post. I blogged once a month last year about my surprise pregnancy and the journey that I went through emotionally, physically and financially to prepare for our third child. By the time the baby was due in January, I had arrived at a very excited and also peaceful happiness with the sudden change that my life was about to take.

And on January 29, 2010 our third daughter arrived! Her name is Mae Marie Card and she is now almost six months old.

It has taken me this long to write because her start was actually tremendously difficult.

I just had to pause. My hands are a bit wobbly. I think I’ve chosen not to return mentally to the many difficult, dark weeks we faced early in Mae’s life. I choose to only focus on her perfection today.

And she IS perfect! She truly is doing wonderfully. But I do want to share our early weeks with her and, I believe, it will be good for me…

We brought Mae home from the hospital believing all was well. In fact, Dave and I agreed that the first week of her life was the best we had ever felt as parents. Delaney, our first daughter, threw us into new-parent shock. Allie came along only 18 months later and life was a blur for a solid two years.

With such an age gap between the “big” girls and Mae, we felt like we were able to love on all three girls with abandon. We had earned our parenting stripes and we weren’t intimidated by Mae’s newness. As a family, we were in an incredible state of bliss.

Then, on Day 9 of Mae’s life, we noticed that she was struggling when she nursed. We gave it another day before deciding she should see a pediatrician. On Day 10, I took her to the doctor thinking she may have a cold. On the way there, I chirped in the car happily with her about our “first outing.”

Upon seeing the nurse for intake, though, all hell broke loose. Literally. The nurse put an oxygen monitor on Mae’s toe and the reading was in the low 70s. It should have been in the upper 90s. Within seconds, they moved us to a room with a gurney and oxygen tanks. Mae and I were surrounded by nurses conducting various tests. A doctor informed me that she was sending us via ambulance to Children’s Hospital.

For the next two days, I was not clear on whether my baby would live or die. They looked at her heart, took viral studies, made her go through a barium swallow to study her esophagus. Dave and I were asked to “hold her down” during some tests and to step outside the room during others. We held hands, cried and prayed.

We stayed in the NICU for six days and learned that her heart was not working properly. We learned that she had a very rare condition called “cor triatriatum dexter,” in which a flap of rogue tissue blocks blood from entering the lower right ventricle, ultimately denying her body and brain oxygen. She also had a hole in her heart between the two atria.

They put her on oxygen and sent us home saying that we would wait two to three months, monitoring that “rogue” tissue to see if it absorbed as she grew.

One week later, though, we had another appointment and learned that the cardiac team had met and decided that Mae needed heart surgery. To wait would be to put her development and her heart in jeopardy.

One week after that, I had to hand my newborn baby girl over to a cardiac surgeon who would literally saw her chest open, stop her heart, drop her body temperature to terribly low levels, re-route her blood through a machine, open her heart, take out the tissue and sew up the hole.

I must pause here and say that Children’s Hospital of Denver is an amazing place.

Mae’s heart surgery was successful. We were in the cardiac ICU for two days, then sent to a non-ICU floor for another two days, and released! She was on oxygen for another month and, on April 6, that came off and she has been perfectly healthy ever since!

Behind the scenes of all these milestones, I could tell you stories of panic, juggling the big girls, friends who went way above and beyond to help us cope, our poor dog’s stress level causing him to vomit all over our house, the moment we were told that Mae must have heart surgery and my instinct (not carried-out) to punch the cardiologist (talk about wanting to kill the messenger), the accommodations we received at the hospital, the moment I saw Mae for the first time after surgery and I nearly passed out…

There are a million stories rolled into this experience. But the outcome of all of them is the same. She is healthy and beautiful and funny and normal. We are lucky. We met many families who will never walk away from that hospital with the bright future we were given.

Deep breath.

So… that’s the story, told very quickly with wobbly fingers at the keyboard.

And, simply put, I am tremendously grateful.

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