Family Updates

The past week has been a busy one for our little family - both kids out of school all week for Spring Break, daily Holy Week services including the Good Friday one which Matt preached, a visit from my Dad, David's birthday ... it seemed pretty non-stop for awhile there. We made a short day trip to Cherokee NC, which is about an hour away. I've made a number of trips there for meetings and home visits with my last job, but I'd not done any of the tourist attractions. We visited the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and a nearby farm/settlement that has a blacksmith shop, pump house, log cabin etc. you can peek in on - very Little House on the Prairie. We had beautiful weather for walking around, and Simon has loved reading the two books we bought at the museum - The First Strawberries and The Trail of Tears.

Matt & I got a big kick out of walking behind
David - we agreed his little stride was
very purposeful and cute - swinging his little
right arm, looking down, very determined. 

David's third birthday got the short end of the stick, a little; we've advised him to avoid having birthdays during Holy Week if it's possible. We had a small celebration after the fellowship dinner on Wednesday, with mini-cupcakes and everyone singing to him. Then my Dad arrived on Thursday afternoon and took us out for pizza. Plenty of gifts all around, most of which have been taken over by Simon - I expect that to an extent but jeez, we have nearly spanked him a couple of times for not allowing David to play with his own gifts.

Sir McSquinty - and look at where that tooth used to be!

Yes, as I matter of fact,
I *did* enjoy my birthday
cake. Why do you ask?

Easter was pretty standard, as far as the secular (Easter basket, candy, egg hunt) parts went. David is so cute on egg hunts - Matt took him to the community one a couple of weeks ago and after giving him one example of  what to do, David picked up about 50 more eggs. On Sunday's hunt at our church, he had fun, but I told him that for next year we have to work on his assertiveness (read: aggression) and speed. The first egg he zoned in on and approached, a little girl swooped in and took it. That happened about 10 more times but it didn't seem to bother him because he still ended up with 30+ eggs.

Yes, Simon is speeding up the egg-drying process. 

As I was falling asleep last night (Sunday) I was sort of surprised to realize, wow, today was Sunday, the whole day, it's not suddenly Monday night, this has been a Very Long Day.

It has been a long few days since Friday, when Matt and I learned of the suicide of a teenager we both know slightly through church. The family has regularly attended elsewhere on Sundays, but has attended some of our contemporary services and participated in our after-school program ... today was the memorial service and I've been thinking about it a lot all weekend. This is the first time I've been to a service for a young person; the next-oldest person whose funeral I've attended was in her mid-thirties, I'd guess. And this is the first service I've been to for someone who has committed suicide ... the family has been through a lot in the past few years and I hope the service was of some comfort to them ... this is obviously something we'll repeat often in the years to come, but we've used this opportunity to have the first big, "Hey Simon and David, we will always love you no matter what and if you have anything that's bothering you at all, even when you are a big kid or a grown-up, we want you to be able to tell us about it."

(( Dear God please let our sons always, always know how much we, and you, love them. Please help us all to remember how many people we love, and who love us. Help us to surround them with caring adults and peers, who will have the courage to speak up if they're worried about our boys. Please let this grieving family know and feel your presence. Amen. ))

This is a sketch I drew the day before David was born. I was trying to explain to my sister the problem with the blood flow through the umbilical cord; I recall sitting in the TGIFriday's and drawing this on the back of my discharge papers from the hospital.

Sketch # 1 shows a representation of normal blood flow through the cord - the flow peaks/is strongest when my heart beats, but even when my heart is at rest, the momentum should be pushing a little blood through - that's why the valleys don't quite touch the axis.

Sketch # 2 shows what had been monitored since my detailed ultrasound 6 weeks earlier - these scattered/random times when there was "absent flow." David would've been a small baby anyway, but because he wasn't getting 100% of the nutrients and oxygen he needed, he really wasn't growing well. But at 26 weeks, it was only happening sporadically.

Sketch # 3 was the bad news we'd gotten at the OB a few days earlier - that "random and sporadic" had become "regular and frequent." The OB had done such a good job of explaining what she was looking for, that I didn't need her to tell me the situation had gotten worse - I remember looking at the monitor and saying to Matt, "Oh, that's not like it was before. That's different than it was before."

So that Wednesday I was admitted to the hospital for a couple of days; I received some steroid shots to speed up the development of David's lungs as much as we could. The steroids had the side effect of temporarily improving the cord-blood issue, but that only lasted for a day or so after I left the hospital. They let me go home and come back every day for outpatient monitoring; my sister'd met me for the first day and we were having lunch afterward. The second day was Sunday, 3/28/2010, and again I didn't need the doctor to tell me, I could see from the monitor that the steroids had worn off and it was time to get the Little (2 lbs, 13 oz) Guy out.

So, we almost lost him. Sitting at the Friday's, enjoying lunch with the World's Greatest Sister, I had no idea what we were in for. But goodness, thank goodness, he's here. Happy Birthday, my Little One.