James was now approaching 4 weeks old and was showing good signs of improvement in all areas so the team at Sick Kids transferred him to Rouge Valley Centenary, a level 2 hospital in Scarborough. We were surprised and concerned to leave Sick Kids at first, but we quickly sensed the competency and liked the space and staff at Rouge Valley.
James no longer needed the regulated temperature and other apparatuses of the incubator, or, "the baby spaceship" as I called it, at Rouge Valley. While at Rouge, we began paying careful attention to how the nursing staff interacted with James because we would soon be carrying on the care that James was receiving from professional nurses 24/7 ourselves - no pressure...
One of the best parts of our stay at Rouge Valley was the nature therapy that we were able to experience on a daily basis. The hospital is situated directly on the north end of the PanAm Path. This meant that at lunch, Ali and I would walk down to the hiking trails that wander all over the Morningside Park area.
There was so much happening around us everyday, and so fast, that the trail became a place where we could slow our pace and truly begin to process the many events of each day in the NICU. It gave Ali and I a chance to establish the many things we needed to accomplish before James came home with us, review, almost as if prepping for a test, the plethora of knowledge we needed to learn to care for a child who was very premature, and to simply take in a peaceful, quiet, biodiverse environment that breathes at its own pace and is a kind of escape in the midst of tension. Your world becomes very microscopic after weeks in the NICU out of necessity, it was healthy for us to attempt moments of normalicy such as walking in the woods and placing ourselves in a larger context.
I have always found hiking to be a monastic type of experience where I immediately feel small, and the world begins to open up around me. A trail will always help sharpen your clarity and focus. It's stillness can help perspective to resurface. There is something very human and reassuring in the act of following a path that others before us have formed. Instead of facing the decision making stress of choosing your own path through an area of wilderness, following a path that you know and trust will bring you to the destination with an ease of mind. The act of moving without an option of choice, you simply follow the path ahead, releases your mind to peruse other thoughts that continually get undermined beneath the over-stimulation and constant micro-decisions of modern life. Robert Moor, the author of On Trails: An Exploration, describes that,
"a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of a path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line."
The trails were a way for us to chose what path we wanted to travel as parents. The path of faith, hope, consistency, fun, honesty and love, along with heaps of grace along the way.
James' path was rounding third base and ready to come home 3 weeks after we arrived at Rough Valley. It was a day to celebrate! He graduated from the NICU!
