I was 36 weeks pregnant, it was a week before Christmas, and my father and I were doing a little last-minute Christmas shopping at the local mall. As we walked around, debating between board games and necklaces, I did feel as though something was different—and I’ll be honest, a little damp—but I had no idea that my water had already broken and was slowly leaking since that morning.

When I got home later that night, my mom insisted we drive to the hospital where they confirmed that I was indeed in late preterm labor, even though I did not yet feel the pain of heavy contractions. My daughter was born the next morning at 9:13 am, a premature and spindly baby, but healthy—or so we thought.

As visitors came and went from my postpartum room, there was a brief 20 minutes where my now fiancé Brandon and I were left alone with our sleeping baby. In those 20 minutes, six things happened, six short moments that I will never forget. Our daughter became very still. Brandon commented that she looked a little blue. I looked down, and I immediately told him to run out into the hallway to get the nearest nurse. The nurse ran in, swooped up the baby from my arms, and ran out.

We did not see our little girl again for almost an entire day, and she was kept in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) for the first five days of her life so the hospital could monitor her breathing. While I went in expecting a normal two-day stay in postpartum, It turned out that those five days in the NICU helped my whole family in several other ways as well.

I hadn’t known this before, but the hospital where I had delivered offered two rooms across the hall from the NICU to new mothers with sickly babies. As we were in the crucial stage of accustoming to breastfeeding, they let me stay in one of those rooms for the rest of my daughter’s time there as I attempted to wake up and feed her every two hours as well as pump milk in between feedings. Pumping for me was a physically painful process where I was also required to save in bottles and log on paper every last drop that I managed to produce (and it was just drops). I was a mostly un-showered hot mess with gigantic eyeglasses and stringy curls, but Brandon visited me and our baby daily before he had to go to work. During that time, our relationship actually blossomed. While I was pregnant, I had heard everyone talk about new babies changing romantic relationships for the worse, so I hadn’t expected us to grow together as we both sacrificed sleep and sanity for our baby girl.

Although I teetered on the edge of overwhelming exhaustion and frustration with breastfeeding, the sweet nurses who worked in the NICU aided and mentored me. They were mostly just giving me advice and hands-on practice as they went about doing their jobs, but still those nurses coached me through baby sponge baths, breastfeeding, supplementary bottle feeding, swaddling, even diaper changing (I had actually never changed a diaper before giving birth). That alone helped me tremendously.

After five days under their tutelage, I emerged from the hospital with a genuine motherly confidence I simply cannot attribute to my own previous experience or constitution. As the youngest child in my family, I had been terrified to even try babysitting as a job and furthermore been crippled by generalized and social anxiety throughout my school years. I know I survived my own postpartum fears and self-doubt only through the tireless training from those NICU nurses.

Five days is short compared to the time many babies face in the NICU, and I sort of felt guilty for accepting the tiny hand-crocheted Santa hat and other items some generous souls had donated for the babies staying in the NICU over the holidays. I still was relieved, though, when the hospital let us take her home the night before Christmas Eve.

Although she was born on December 18^th, 2016, little Iris came home just in time for Christmas, and she will always be a Christmas baby to me. She is precious, wonderful, and a blessing to our whole family.