Thursday, November 27, 2014

Side by Side: Thankful

This year you turned 15 months ON Thanksgiving!  What a day to celebrate!

Last year on Thanksgiving Abby held you for the first time.  Last year Daddy did not see you on Thanksgiving - he stayed home with the boys.  Last year I went to the very, very, quiet hospital with Abby.  It was almost eerie how quiet it was.  No one chooses to go to the hospital on a holiday.  Most staff are home with their families.  Doctors keep shorter hours.  And only family visiting the critically ill choose to come.  We spent the morning with you because I didn't want to miss your first Thanksgiving.  Then, we took a long, painful trip to Lima to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Rumschlags.  It was painful because my heart was you in the hospital and I had not been out of the city limits for over three months.  I didn't feel like I had anything to be thankful for because my family and my heart was torn apart.

But look at you today!  How much bigger and stronger you are!  How much happier you are without all those nurses and doctors poking and prodding you!  Without all of the breathing equipment obstructing your view! Without all of the monitors attached to you!  Without the feeding tube down your throat!  Little boy, this year we have so much to be thankful for!



Getting your first taste of turkey!  You liked it a lot!

Our family!  Silly Jeremiah didn't want to be in the photo!

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Patching

We had an ophthalmology appointment for you on Monday.  Your follow-up was supposed to be in December, but I called to make it earlier.  Although you LOVE your glasses and really have no issues keeping them on, your eye still turns in and you still tilt your head to the left when you are looking at things.  So at this appointment she suggested patching your good eye.  This will you use your left (weaker) eye and hopefully strengthen the muscles so you begin to use both of your eyes equally.

Today was the first day we started patching.  You did not like it.  You screamed and squirmed when we put the patch on.  Then your left eye went extremely cross-eyed because you were working so hard to see!  After a while you began to calm down, but you can see you really didn't like it!  You pulled your glasses off in an attempt to get the eye patch off.  Poor little buddy.  It makes Mommy sad to see you react like this!

I absolutely love this shirt for you! 




**UPDATE** 12/8/14 - You don't mind us putting on the patch anymore.  You've gotten used to it and are calm when we stick it on.  You do tug at your glasses more with the patch on, but not as much as that first day.  Sometimes your glasses will slingshot across the room because of the elastic strap when you pull at them!  Your eye still crosses more with the patch on.  And poor baby you bump into things walking and crawling because you can't see that side of your body.  You've gotten more bruises because of this patching!

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Thinking back; Tiny Ears


Thinking back to those early days in the NICU.  Your purplish skin, your tiny features, the fuzzy white hair that still covered your body.  You weren't supposed to be out of the womb yet.  I had never known a baby so premature.  Sure, it seemed EVERYONE had a friend of a friend or some distant relative who was born early; I got really tired of hearing it.  But no one they knew was born quite as early as you.  And this early, every day counts!  So those well-meaning statements were not comforting; we didn't know what was going to happen to you and everyone's story is different!  All we knew was that you had a brain bleed and it was bad.  It wasn't only in your ventricles, but it was also in your cerebellum.  They chance of you having severe disabilities was very high.  It seemed as though nothing would ever be "normal" again.  I didn't have much hope of you looking "normal," acting normal, functioning normal, I couldn't even imagine your ears being normal!

When you were born there was no cartilage in your ears.  They were perfectly formed with all of the folds, but they were just skin.  So that meant if you were laying on your side and your ear got folded, it would stay folded until the nurse or me fixed it.  There was no form to your ear.  Most of the time that I took pictures I fixed your ear so you would look "normal" but now I wish that I had taken a few more with your folded ears because I don't want to forget even the tiny ways that we saw you grow and change right before our very eyes.  Not many people get to experience the miracle of a baby's development.  It was scary, but we witnessed a miracle in more ways than one!

Nurses would tell us that the cartilige would harden and they would have form to them after a couple months.  I didn't believe them though.  I couldn't see it.   You also had a HUGE ear lobe in addition to your large ear (compared to the size of your head)  You still have a large ear!  We've even compared it to your brothers :)

9/10/13 - a crumpled ear
9/16/13 - Your lobes were so huge and your ears got so smushed

9/18/13 - folded over little ear
10/4/13 - You were so swollen - Even your ears swelled up.


Now your ears look totally different but are still big

June 2014 - Now they are about the size of your brothers'!

Monday, November 17, 2014

World Prematurity Day

World Prematurity Day.  I distinctly remember a March of Dimes billboard about two years ago.  It was on the main road, about a mile from our house.  Often when I passed by it on the road, I had thoughts, stereotypical thoughts of women who smoked, drank, did drugs all while pregnant.  Women who did not get regular OB checkups, those who neglected to eat healthy or take vitamins, obese women with high blood pressure causing pre-eclampsia, women who elected to have c-sections for convenience not medical necessity.  I would never belong to that group!

HA!  Funny how things can change so quickly.  Many of those stereotypes are true, but there are many appointment-going, vitamin taking, exercising, healthy moms like me lumped into this group to celebrate World Prematurity day.  Ultimately, MOD says they want to eliminate premature births altogether.  I'm not sure how my type of PPROM (that happened for no apparent reason) could ever be prevented, but at least people can become more aware that premature birth can happen to anyone.  Hopefully someday those premature stereotypes can be minimized.  Hopefully people can just become more aware of the awful scary journey that goes along with preemies...especially micro-preemies.

But today I celebrate Joshua (and next year I will remember to wear purple)  Thankful for the March of Dimes and their research that gave Joshua surfactant to help develop his lungs after he was born.  And for all of the other research that has been done to give micro-preemies a better chance at life.   Most importantly, praise the Lord for His healing hands!

The first picture ever taken of our little Joshua
23 minutes after you were born.  Those were a
LONG 23 minutes!  And even longer days to come!

What a transformation!  Love you!


Sunday, November 16, 2014

Mommy's Little Explorer

These days you are on the move all the time!  The gate is up, doors to the basement and bathrooms must be closed, floors need to be swept or vacuumed, small toys put away, trash and recycling cans need to be guarded...Maybe it is because you are the 4th child and I cannot watch you as closely as I should be every moment of the day, but I think mainly it is that you are the strongest and most determined baby that we have had and you explore and get into everything!  No obstacle is too difficult to break through for you!

At times you explore so hard you crawl right out of your pants!

At first, you began by crawling through small spaces.  Back when you were still army crawling you would squeeze through the tiniest of spaces.  You would crawl through the exersaucer or through tight spaces between couches or toys.  It seemed as if you purposefully sought out these tiny spaces just to see if you could make it through.


Then, you tried to climb over things.  You would climb over the cross bar on kitchen chairs.  (You are the first baby we've had since we got these "new to us" chairs.  And you face planted too many times on the hard kitchen floor, so out came the "old" kitchen chairs that had no cross-bar.  Problem solved...at least until you found something else to scale.

Getting ready to crawl over the cross-bar
Here are the safer chairs to crawl through!

You have Swiffered our kitchen floor with your belly and have picked up every little speck of grossness on it (just like your brother Jeremiah did)  Only you wanted to match the grossness of David (when I fished a dead fly out of his mouth)  so you found a ladybug to eat one day.  Delicious!  Not to mention the other leaves, small kid toys, and day old dinners I have to fish out of your mouth

Then we had to make sure that you could not tip over any toys onto yourself.  At our kid table after you squeezed through tiny spaces, you would pull yourself up to a stand, then push down the (pretty heavy for a 17 lb-er) kid-sized wooden chair.

Sometimes you just like to find a small
space to squeeze into to drink your milk!
 .
At the beginning of November we had
to get out the gate!

And finally to show your super-strength and determination to NOT be barricaded in the family room.  In an attempt to block you from getting into the kitchen I would set up a barricade using larger items in the room:  ottoman, exersaucer and pillows, boxes, baskets, music table, etc.  So you hated the barricade so much, you climbed over your Baby Einstein Music table not once, but twice and face-planted on the ground as I was running to catch you both times.  And then the next day you decided to crawl into the laundry basket of toys that was part of the baricade; thankfully Daddy got you (and was able to snap a pic) before you crawled head first out the other side!
This is the same table you successfully crawled over!
It comes up to your mid-belly!

Here you are trying to crawl out the other side of the toy basket!

Face-plants for a baby with glasses are a totally different story that a baby with no glasses.  You have already scratched the center of the lens from your face-plant, not to mention the bruises or rings around your eyes.  Thankfully the MiraFlex glasses are flexible enough that you have not cut yourself or broken the frames from doing all of these stealth super-hero stunts!  BUT I am so thankful for that fight in you, your strength and determination, because that is why I can celebrate these milestones today!
Our strong little superman

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Side-by-side: Ducky

There were a couple pics last year that I wanted to do a side-by-side with this year.  Here's our Halloween Ducky!


 




 

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Happy Halloween 2014!

We had a lot of fall events going on this month
We spent a weekend in Lima with
Aunt Liz and Uncle Mike. We went to a corn maze!





Boo at the zoo!


Elephants smashing pumpkins!

A long day for our little guy!
Pumpkin carving!

The boys think carving pumpkins is GROSS!

Mommy's idea to make the pumpkin a Joshua Jack-o-lantern
You were in bed by the time we finished.
Our little pumpkin



You were so intrigued by the pumpkins, stems,
and leaves!  It was ridiculously hard
to get you to glance toward the camera!





Trick or Treat!


My favorite Davy Crockett!



The best picture I've gotten of your Jack-o-lantern teeth

My 2 supermans

Daddy dressed up for work this year