Over the past four weeks in the NICU, it’s been fascinating watching our relationship with this hospital unit change. Soon after the birth of our twin boys (9 weeks early, planned c-section), I was walking briskly down the hall following a parade of respiratory therapists, a neonatal doctor, nurses and isolettes (with boys inside) to the inner sanctum of our local hopital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU.) The education of this place’s strange customs began immediately- stopped from instinctively following my boys, I was kindly given a lesson in “scrubbing up”- cracking open an iodine brush pack, rolling up my sleeves at the sink, and then scrubbing vigorously for 2 minutes to sanitize myself as much as possible.