Oh, man. Rob and I opened the boxes and started decorating tonight, a task each year that sends memories flooding to my mind this year, I saw this in the first box:

Those blankets were handmade by one of the NICU nurses and her mother, a gift they give over and over to NICU patients each Christmas.

I knew they were in there – I thought of them the other day. But touching them, the Christmas blankets that decorated (and covered) the tops of my babies’ isolettes, reminded me of all the times we pulled them away to see or take out the babies, the times each night when I would hold back a corner as I read a Christmas story, said a prayer and wished them a good night before carefully pulling their festive little blankets back over, wrapping their little boxes in darkness and, essentially, tucking them in for the night.

Oh, the tears.

Then the second box had this at the top:

In the second box I opened was this:

It’s a simple, less emotionally charged memory, but the fact that I grabbed one of those patient-belongings bags to wrap the star from the top of last year’s tree – it just shows how many of those I carried around last year, full of dirty preemie laundry or bottles of milk I had pumped while visiting the babies. I always had something extra to take home, and I often left with one or two of those bags in hand along with my full diaper (pump parts) bag.

Life is so, so different this year. I’m eternally thankful for that.

It doesn’t mean I don’t remember, though, and I certainly can’t help but think of the families that are where we were last year, cherishing the handmade blankets, decorating IV towers with ornaments from home and leaving their babies each night, their arms full of stuff but still empty of what matters most.