If you're a parent, you have some idea of how the birth of a child is supposed to go. After the most intense experience of the mother's life (and sometimes the dad's, too), a baby pops out, the nurses clean it up and then mom gets to hold her baby, skin-to-skin. In our case, when Matthew was born, they had to save his life and then whisk him away to a neonatal intensive care unit. We never even had a chance to touch him, let alone hold him. The urgency was surreal, so was watching his heart rate drop.