and then back to the nicu issue. one of my partners e-mailed, had a talk with the mother she was interviewing. the mother was grateful because the employer was allowing her to work at the hospital so she could save her leave for when the baby came home. this is a mom that just gave birth to a medically fragile pre-term infant and she's recovering and there she is with her laptop and incredibly grateful to do that because she'll still have time for the regular full term months at home that we have a lot of science about that say it's so important. and she was grateful because she's going to be allowed to borrow her vacation time for next year, so borrow it ahead of time in order to add on a couple more weeks. what happens when the baby starts at day care and gets sick? what happens? right. and so these are the issues that families are encountering, and i want to argue that that 12-week mark is really kind of a minimum and that we-- ideally i would hope that we would be talking about an even longer time. >> i would add

the medical bills were in excess of $1 million for her nicu stay. but when we got home, the second part of our journey started. she was in isolation for the first year. we had to make sure that her lungs had the chance to fully heal and fully develop. she had countless hours of therapy. it started with physical therapy to literally teach her how to roll over. we moved on to speech therapy, as well as occupational therapy. so that's hundreds of hours of therapy that she needed just to catch up to her peers that were born full term and healthy. >> i got a chance to meet her before the show started. >> she's adorable. she looks fantastic. how is she doing now? >> she doing great. she's four and a half. she's super spunky. she's very feisty. the nurses told us the second she was born -- they said, "you know, we have a good feeling about her. she came out and she's just feisty right off the bat. she loves life. she has this joy for life that is just contagious, and i attribute it to her early start. she chose to be here, she fought to be here. >> and you

it's really nice for families in the nicu to know that even when they can't there, their babies haveething to hold on to. >> i thought this was a cool way to make it a little bit cozier, a little warmer environment. >> so sweet. the toys are all sanitized before they go to the hospital, and they also have to pass pretty strict inspections to make sure they are safe for the babies. super sweet story there. >>> we shift our focus back over to the weathou because ife tired of the rain, i'm sorry, but we have no reprieve in the days >> oh, no. coming days, i'm liking into next week. so here's the deal. we've got another soggy day ahead of us. i think monday is going to look a lot like today. we wake up to clouds. showers and storms begin in the afternoon. a little bit scattered. let's go ahead and answer some weather questions you're probably thinking about. are there going to be storms to trrow? yere will be some storms, primarily rain showers but of g course we'll some storms in there. then what about flooding? defiy.tely a possibil i think it's actually more likely that we're going to

massive evacuations are underway including babies inside a nicu in a medical center. and structures have been destroyed and even the news team had to go off the air because of the danger. >> we've been here live and we're being evacuated. that's why we are closing out right now. we are going to leave the station because it is now unsafe to be here. so like in, we have all the information -- >> dan simon is there for us. you're up live in red dingreddi. our hearts go out to those firefighters and families. show us around. >> reporter: first of all, these devastating wildfires in california have become such a common occurrence. you can see what this did in redding. you can see this subdivision pretty much leveled. a lot of homes look just like this. we've seen home owners come back this morning, this afternoon, looking to see what they can salvage. any time you see a homeowner picking through belongings with their tears streaming down their faces, this fire just came in so fast. it actually began on monday. they really felt like they were out of the woods. they were not

>> so far, that's what we've done is sent the babies from the nicu, there were six of them, we air lifted them out a couple of nights ago as a precaution. it takes three to four hours to get a baby ready to go and be transported, so that's why just decided to err on the side of safety and have them air lifted from redding to the sacramento area, which is about 150 miles or so. we did prepare high-risk patients in the event that we wanted to. you know, because you've got logistics there with wheelchairs, gurneys, that kind of thing, that did not happen, though. right now, there are no plans to evacuate anyone else at all. we're just happy that the babies are safe, away from the fire with their families with them. >> so what you say there are no plans to evacuate. you just kind of described the volatility of the conditions there and how unpredictable it might be. do you kind of have that plan b in place if it comes to the point where everyone must go? >> oh, absolutely. we have had a command center set up more than two days now. we've started early in the morning on what would that be, thur