Cupcake Hell

I wanted them to be beautiful, perfect, beyond edible. It turned into hell. I love the whole process of baking and creating fun things, but not being pregnant and on my feet doing it all day. Maybe I shouldn't have stuffed each tiny little cake, I don't know. I guess in the long run it paid off, the new mother loved her cupcakes (it was for a baby shower) and the guests enjoyed taking home leftovers to their husbands, and I'm enjoying laying on the couch eating them myself.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

The Good:
So the good news from yesterday is that we get to deliver the baby in Des Moines. I’m so excited by this news, it means the boys can stay in school and I won’t have to worry about them the way I would have if we’d been in Iowa City, and I’ll be able to be at home with them each evening. The baby will probably not do great after delivery and they’re expecting him to need to stay in the hospital for about one to two weeks afterwards. The main concern is feeding. Children with heart defects do not eat well, it takes a lot of energy to eat, and they just don’t have it. If he doesn’t do well he might have to go home with a nose tube for feeding, especially if they don’t want him to use up the calories it takes to breast/bottle feed.
We’re also hoping to let him get about 4-6 months old before needing surgery, which will be nice because it will be in the summer then and more convenient with the older boys to go out to Iowa City for a few weeks.
We got a tour of the hospital, it is really nice and their pediatric center is amazingly staffed with places to stay and totally family oriented. I was even informed that they have specialty nurses primarily for the entertainment of the children, to do activities with them. The nurse coordinator told me that they would take my older boys and do activities with them and keep them busy throughout the day so that I could be with the baby. And each room is equipped with dvds, movies, and playstations. Tom was excited about the playstation, but if I had to sit in a hospital room with him playing Steve Madden Football, I think I’d eventually kill him.

The Bad:
His heart condition is more than just the atrial and ventricular septum defect. The official title is Atrioventricular Septal Defect. So besides those two holes, the atrial hole is so big that it spans down into the ventricular hole causing one large atrioventricular valve to exist rather than two separate valves. This causes the oxygenated and un-oxygenated blood to mix together freely, there is no separation in the chambers of the heart, and everything is free flowing, the two valves that flow into the right side, and the three that flow into the left side are swinging all over the place.
Here is a normal heart:
Here is what my baby’s heart looks like:
When he is born the right side of his heart and his lungs will receive too much blood, and the body won’t receive enough oxygenated blood. Plus the one large AV valve might not work well and may allow blood to reenter the top chambers, which we won’t be able to see until he’s born. He will be on a lot of heart medication to keep the strain off his body and heart for as long as possible for him to get older before the surgery. He will most likely stay weak and small until the condition is fixed.
Here is a picture of the surgical procedure: (Sorry about the pics, they should have red in them so you can tell the difference between the oxygenated & un-oxygenated blood flow in the heart, but the printer ran out of ink at the hospital, so these are the pics I got, and I couldn't find ones of this condition on the Internet, probably just didn't look hard enough!)
What they will do is separate the top two chambers of the heart and the bottom two chambers, and make two functioning valves out of the one large atrioventricular valve. This will have to be done with open heart surgery while he’s on bypass. It’s a scary thought to think that they’ll be stopping his heart completely.
Now if he starts going into heart failure a lot earlier and they don’t want to perform the surgery on a newborn, they can do a temporary fix where they put a pulmonary artery band to restrict the extra blood flow to the lungs until open heart surgery could be done when he’s bigger and stronger. This procedure is done with a small incision in the side, and the band is taken off during the later surgery.

The Ugly:
The hospitals, the wires, the medicine, the stress of a sick child…I sometimes wonder if I’m strong enough to do this. I know I won’t sleep for a long time, and I hope I can stay semi sane for Talin and Collin throughout this whole process. And I’m just scared. I’m extremely blessed and feel such gratitude that we have modern medicine that can just about fix anything, but it’s still scary. I don’t want my baby to suffer, to feel pain or fear when he’s so young, I can’t stand the thought of all he’ll endure, and I wish I could take it on myself so he didn’t have to suffer through any of it. But I also have a lot of faith that the Lord will be by his side doing just that.
I just wish it wasn’t so complicated now. The ASD was easily fixable, not such stress, but the added in problems are scary, there is too much that can go wrong. I have to have too much faith in the surgeon to fix it properly the first time and hopefully the only time. I also realize that I can’t focus on all the if’s and I have to be grateful and upbeat about all the positive things. If nothing else it will make our little family stronger, right?

And just a quick thanks to everyone who has commented, emailed, called me with well wishing, prayers and thoughts, it’s more than I deserve. I have such a great support system I really don’t know what I would do without family, even though everyone is thousands of miles away!

One More Day

One more day...

this makes me think of the Les Miserables song they sing before the revolution. Kind of fitting, kind of not. For me it's not a revolution I'm going into but hospitals and cardiologist galore, and possibly some long awaited answers I've been craving since the end of November.

My anticipation for the 23rd has been beyond intense the past few weeks, I've literally been counting down each day, and now here I am, at my one more day status.

Thank goodness!

I've spent the entire day trying to keep myself absolutely occupied. Last weekend it was crocheting, I made five baby hats and a scarf and hat for Collin, all within three days.

Today it was cupcakes.

I made over a hundred cupcakes that I'm storing in the freezer until Saturday for a friends baby shower.

Will I need a hundred cupcakes?

Chances are exceptionally slim that no, I won't.

Do I care?

No.

Not in the least, I mean it occupied four hours today.

Besides the fact that there will probably only be 25-30 people at the shower on Saturday, I needed to make those cupcakes, all one hundred this morning. But it wasn't enough, so then I decided to make frosting flowers to put on the cupcakes when I frost them Friday evening. I made a lot of those, probably too many. That's okay, that was another two hours.

Then I cleaned the kitchen, swept, mopped, dusted every surface, and then cleaned the bathroom. All the while I managed to talk to Rachel (my cousin), Betsy, Rachel (my neighbor watching the boys tomorrow), and Mandi on the phone, for a significant time each. And yet I'm still going, I mean, I'm writing a post! Oh, forgot to add in that I cleaned the boys room without making them help me either.

Am I nesting?

It seems a bit early to be doing so. Maybe I am, who knows.

If I am it's in preparation for the big day tomorrow.

Random little tid bit here, but I've been spending a lot of time with my children lately, I know, that's what mother's do, but with them being sick all last week and now with the past two days off from school it's seemed like more than normal.

Here are some odd things that have come out of Talin's mouth lately.

"Mom, you look skinny today, except for your belly, it looks real fat."
"Dad, I love your dreamy eyes, and sparkly teeth."
"I can't wait to grow up and get married, then I can have as many kids as I want."
"It's taking too long to grow up, I've been waiting forever!"

Well I'm off to vacuum the downstairs, make my bed, start dinner and fluff the couch, yeah, I said fluff the couch.

Friday News

I just found out that my baby has a second hole in his heart. A ventricular septal defect as well as the atrial septal defect.

Sometimes life gets you down, and yet I can still smile at the Flight of the Conchords. (and an apology to my mother for the constant use of the word "flippin'" throughout the song, but I can get away with it today, my baby has two holes in his heart, she can't yell at me.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FArZxLj6DLk

Day 5

Today marks the fifth day that I've been housebound with sick kids.

It all started Sunday...

Sunday: Collin has bad cough and fever. Stays home from church with me.

Monday: Collin stays home from school with nasty cough. Talin goes to school, comes home feeling sick and has diarrhea and an accident in his pants that evening.

Tuesday: Talin stays home from school. Collin goes to school. I pick Collin up from school to be told that he coughed all morning and not to bring him in on Wednesday if his cough hasn't eased up.

Wednesday: I'm determined for everyone to go back to school. Give Collin the cough medicine, doesn't ease up his cough, decide to keep him home instead of getting the phone call to pick him up early. Look across the table at Talin and notice his eye is insanely red and a bit swollen. Great... I swear Rachel jinxed me with this one with her phone call on Sunday asking me questions about Evan having pink eye. Everyone ends up staying home. Luckily I have the pink eye drops from a previous infection.

Wednesday Night: Talin runs a fever. Collin starts the diarrhea thing and has an accident in his pants. Does it get any better? I call Tom at the end of my rope, can no longer deal with the sickness! He comes home and determines no one is fit to go to school tomorrow.

Thursday: Completely overwhelmed on my fifth day on how to keep the little boys entertained. Might result to movies and popcorn all day.

Saturday Matinee

I went out Saturday afternoon with a friend, for a much needed get away to the movies. I’m a total movie fan, love going. Before I got married I would often go by myself just to get away, yeah, what nineteen year old girl goes to flicks by herself? But there was always something so freeing about that, never having to promote the movie you want to see with someone else, in charge of all the decisions.
So on Saturday I convinced my friend Betsy to abandon the nursing baby for a few hours and go see Juno with me. She wanted to see 27 Dresses, but I felt like it was a movie I’d already seen just by watching the preview. Plus my $6 matinee fee was only going to be spent on Juno that day, little did she know, so I managed to convince her. We tried to get another friend to come with us, but she was not thrilled with seeing a movie about a sixteen year old girl that gets pregnant, she felt it was promoting teen pregnancy and made us feel a little uncomfortable at our interest in the movie, but whatever!
Anyway, the movie was great, awesome acting, quirky personalities, just a lot of fun to watch. So I totally recommend it. And even though I laughed throughout most of the film, I almost sobbed at the end, but that’s probably just my hormones. So go to the movies and enjoy.

Confusions & Frustrations

Collin’s confused. He thinks he’s five. Ever since starting CTR 5 last week, he’s convinced that he’s somehow turned five years old without having a birthday. He has come up to me often this week to inform me that he’s five now, he says, “Mom, I’m five now.” Or I’ll overhear him call Talin ‘little brother’. Um when was it possible to skip a whole year? I’m trying to convince him that being four is just as fabulous as being five.

And I’m depressed. I’ve lost my princess status. They were playing the usual imaginary game of being knights and saving a princess, who typically is me. And then I overheard it. Talin told Collin that I could no longer be a princess, I was too big. “Princesses don’t have bellies as big as mom’s.” I’m still nursing that wound.

And I’m frustrated and I’m struggling with rising above that frustration. I don’t seem to have a handle on my life lately. I want answers, with this baby, with the wait, with the delivery, with the surgery. I’m so confused and feel like it’s out of my hands, which it totally is. I keep saying I should go on and live each day like its normal and everything is fine, but then it hits me, life sucks right now. I feel like I’m bi-polar, both happy and ignorant or severely down and overwhelmed with the future. I know I should have more faith and not let this fear consume me, but that is easier said than done right now. So I’m trying to take it day by day. And I really just needed to write it down and get it out; because I’m sure others are sick of me talking about it. So there it is, and I think I’ll go make dinner now.

Monster Trucks

This is what we were doing Saturday afternoon. Sitting in the stands of the loudest show I've ever been to, but also one of the funnest. Monster trucks. Not really my thing I thought, but it was a really good time, and I'm definitely living in a boys world.

We were lucky to go, my father and mother-in-law, Kraig and Karen sent us money for Christmas, and Tom and I had set it aside to go on a date with, but when we saw that monster trucks were in town, we just couldn't resist, we knew the boys would love it. So thank you to them for the entertainment this weekend.

The boys were beyond excited when the show started. Thank goodness we brought ear plugs for them.

Tom and Talin were thrilled. I thought the mohawks were appropriate for the setting.

So many pictures. But it was truly crazy what these trucks could do.

Sitting on dad's lap enjoying the show with your own popcorn, who could ask for anything more?

The boys really liked the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle truck, and it was one of the fastest, beating out the illusive Gravedigger in the freestyle competition.

But as you can see, Gravedigger had an unfortunate accident thirty seconds into his freestyle. Tom was quite upset, being a big fan of Gravedigger.

Collin had way too much fun harassing me during the show, I think he gets away with way too much because he looks so much like his dad!

And on a random note. This is the solution of a frustrated father at dinnertime, attempting to keep Collin in his chair. Yeah, he tied him up. I think it was more exciting than punishing for the boy.

On with the Routine

Winter break is coming to an end and I'm terribly sad. The boys have already started school back up, and Tom returns on Monday.

Back to routine!

But here is something fun we did over the break, snow angel making. One of the days it snowed Tom took the boys out with him to shovel the drive-way, and I caught them making snow angels. It might look like fun, but believe me, it's freezing! Our high has been in the single digits with nasty winds as well. But this weekend we are moving up to a shocking thirty and forty degree weather!



The resulted angels in the snow.

On another note, here is the official belly shot. Today I am officially seven months and in my third trimester.

Scary!!

Went in for an ultrasound last week and everything is looking perfect with the baby. And the best news of all? He's in the 30 percentile for his weight and age, which is beyond fabulous news. We also have set up an appointment with the cardiologists in Iowa City for the 23rd of this month. They are going to do a fetal heart echo ultrasound, and hopefully be able to give us some more answers. They'll let us know if I'll need to deliver in Iowa City, and also the kind of immediate health care the baby will need when he's born. I'm seriously counting down the days until we go to this appointment. I'm not a patient girl, and this pregnancy has stressed me and my patience far beyond my capacity!

I also had a regular OBGYN appointment today and everything looked great. Except for the unfortunate side effect my holiday feasting has resulted in. I've put on so much weight and I'm just now entering my third trimester, I'm scared I won't be able to lose it when the baby is born. Thirty-five pounds already!! I never gained more than 25 my whole pregnancy with my other two boys! But for now I'm going to try to think positive and just be happy we both are healthy thus far.

Post Christmas

Well we made it. The first time being completely alone for the Christmas season, and it certainly wasn't a bad thing. Here's the recounting of events, nothing overly exciting, just our little family.

Christmas Eve: The decorating of the gingerbread house. They make it so easy for you to do, but with a four and five year old and twenty sticky fingers jamming candy in your face, when you're just trying to make a perfect house...impossible. So we gave up early in the game, and this was the outcome.

Posing with the finished masterpiece. Two very proud boys to leave their house for Santa to eat that night.

Christmas morning. It will always have that magical feeling. Presents waiting to be torn into.

The new giraffe tent awaiting the slumber party to be had inside of it later that evening.

Two awestruck boys, in an unfortunately blurry picture. But you can see the thrill on their faces as they see the toys that Santa has brought them.

Talin put this on first thing, so all of his pictures are of him as a Ninja. Love the dress up clothes.

Collin goes for the action figures first, especially if they're sporting a weapon of some sort.

The amazement of a slinky, especially the excitement of being a first time slinky owner, with amazing stairs throughout the house to slink down.

First he had the Ninja outfit on, then he was naked. And apparently my chubby baby is far from chubby or being a baby these days.

Talin was happy to buy his dad his favorite treat for a Christmas gift, and Tom was more than happy to receive it.

A lot of the morning was spent on the racetrack. Tom had a set identical to this one when he was a kid, so he was thrilled to sit down with them and cruise all morning.

Look closely and you'll notice the missing tooth. It came out Sunday afternoon. And the one next to it is pretty loose and expected to come out soon. Two front teeth missing, he looks adorable, although it doesn't help with the speech!

Moon sand, or should I call it satan sand?

A good hour of fun, and then it disappeared for FOREVER. Nobody has asked about it yet, thank goodness!

End of the day. Yeah, I wore the same outfit two days in a row. What can I say, it was Christmas, and I certainly wasn't going anywhere!

And I'm playing Yahtzee, Tom got it for a family gift, but it's more my gift, since I can sit and play by myself for hours on end.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas as well, we missed all of our family this year!!

Happy Birthday Tom

Yesterday Tom turned 29!

The Thor shirt is a gift from Collin, picked out by him alone.

I made Tom wear it to school today.

We had a super fabulous dinner, that I slaved away to create.

Amazing lasagna (thank you mother for the cookbook). And of course this fabulous cheesecake.

Yes, it was as good as it looks.
All that smoke!
Next year I'll have to stand by with the fire extinguisher for safety measures!

I LOVE you Tom, and your boys think the world of you. You're the most patience, kindest, caring person I know, a fabulous husband and father.
We love you!!

Talin

Talin is growing up and it’s overwhelming to realize how old he is really getting. I can hardly believe he’ll be six in April. So here are some random things he’s said as of late, the oddest things come out of his mouth lately.

Driving home from school the other day.
Talin- “Mom, when are we going to New York.”
Me- “I don’t know Tal, why do you want to go to New York?”
Talin- “I want to go somewhere that people speak Spanish.”
Me- “They don’t speak Spanish in New York.” (well okay, maybe some)
Talin- “Where can we go that people speak Spanish.”
Me- “Mexico. Why do you want to go somewhere that people speak Spanish?”
Talin- “I just want to hear people speak it.”
Me- “Then for heaven’s sake, let’s just call up Aunt Mandi!”

Lying on the couch with him the other night.
Talin- “do you feel him kicking?” (Referring to the baby)
Me- “no, not right now.”
Talin- “will you let me know if you do?”
Me- “sure.”
Talin- “If I’m at school when he kicks, do you think you could call to let me know?”
What?? I think I’d be calling him all day!

I went into Talin’s school the other day to help out and his teacher asked him to introduce the guest he had brought to school with him. Talin turns to me and says, “This is Megan.” What?? Did he really just introduce me as Megan, and not his mom? He is indeed an interesting boy!

SPT - it's ornamental

Anyone in my family who has just opened my blog to see this picture is probably sighing with worry.

I love ornaments. I take after my mother a lot, she often buys new ornaments throughout the year as she sees them, and they are always the cutest things ever.

Well the ice skaters were bought during my teenage years. My joy during the holiday season was to arrange the ice skaters each day into a new daring position. And then to stand back and watch the reaction of fellow family members (mainly my mother) as they would discover the compromising positions of the ornaments. So amusing. I was naughty, but very creative.

So when my mother's tree became overwhelmed with too many ornaments she handed them out to us, as she saw fit, or as we demanded. And I was thrilled to be given the ice skaters (I mean who else could they go to??). They no longer enjoy their compromising positions, and my lady skater has lost a leg over the years, but I always have a little smile on my lips when I take them out of their Christmas box and remember the good times with them.

On a different note, this is my all-time favorite ornament on my tree. From my earliest memories of our Christmas tree I remember this Santa Claus as being mine. I wasn't allowed to hold him or take him off the tree, but he was so special because he belonged to me. And now he hangs at the top of my tree every year, far from grabby little hands, and reminds me of my childhood Christmas.

In our little family we've started a tradition each year of the boys getting their own ornaments. We write their name and the year on each one. Here is Talin's for this year. A soccer ball. I do let them pick them out, but not without heavy influence on my part as to what it should be. One year Talin ended up with a crouching Batman ornament, and I've vowed to never let a similar ornament grace my tree. This year the challenge was distracting him from the many gaudy, silver and gold crosses. He was insistent on one. But in the end Tom was successful in encouraging the soccer ball.

And surprisingly enough, my most stubborn, always right little boy is easily influenced by me. I don't know for how many more years I might hold this power over Collin, but I plan to use it while I can. So he decided on the cute little snowman, with my smiling approval of course.

And on a completely different note, we've had a nasty winter storm come through Des Moines. Ice that coats everything, pulling down power lines and causing major driving issues, and now it's starting to snow and we're expecting 2-5 inches of snow on top of the ice, which makes for a lethal combination.

So the boys are home from school today, and we are taking it easy, hot cocoa and movies kind of a day. And even though I was strictly prohibited by Tom not to attempt to go outside or walk on our porch, because of the ice and my delicate condition (ha!), I still had to get this picture. I managed to do it safely as well. Here is one of our trees on the front porch area, so weighed down by ice that's it's fallen over onto the walk-way. Fun!

Me and my dirty hair

It snowed all day today, and it was really quite beautiful to watch the snow fall throughout the day. Close to three o'clock I got Collin and I bundled him up to go pick up Talin from school. Well, as we were heading outside, Tom called and said he would pick him up. I was a little bummed because I enjoy driving in the snow, especially freshly fallen snow. And a little worried, because Tom's little car does terrible in the snow. So I decided that since Collin and I were already bundled up we would play outside. I'm not very good at playing all the time. All I could see was snow that needed to be shoveled, so that's what I started to do, shovel snow. I know I probably shouldn't be doing that being six months pregnant and all, but sometimes I get frustrated by limitations and do things anyway.
Well all the neighbors seemed to be out shoveling as well, it was really quite social. My next door neighbor (not the naked one) started a friendly conversation about the weather and what not.
Then he asks me, "Didn't your hair use to be blonde?"
I reply with a yes.
Then he says, "So is this your natural color then?"
I tell him I'm actually a natural blonde, and I've dyed my hair this color.
His reply, "Why would you dye your hair that dirty color? You should have gone red, all the movie stars have red tints in their hair now, that looks really good. They say redheads have more fun."
What??? Did he really just call my hair dirty?? I was appalled. I've only talked to this man a handful of times with the occasional hi and how's your day, and he had the nerve to tell me my hair looked a dirty color?? My only reply was, "Oh, I thought blondes have more fun."
What??? Why can't I ever think up something witty on the spot, or put people in their place who are out of line. And why am I so upset about what some random neighbor thinks who obviously has no style or great opinion or class for that matter!
I went inside shortly after that. I didn't want my 'dirty' hair to offend any of the other neighbors.

Our Baby Boy

So I’ve been thinking for the past few days, what exactly I want to write and how I want to write it. If you’ve visited Amy’s blog you know about our baby news. But it’s something I should write about. So here it goes.

The doctor has wanted me to get ultrasounds to check the length of my cervix to predetermine the possibility of pre-term labor with this pregnancy. Well, I had my second ultrasound appointment on Tuesday. I was alone. The ultrasound technician spent about twenty minutes looking at the baby’s heart; she had me lay on my side to get different angles. It was odd; I felt ill at ease and kept shoving my worries to the back of my head. But no matter how much I tried not to worry there was a nagging that something was not right.
After the ultrasound she took me to a separate room (not the waiting room) and told me she needed to call my doctor to make sure she didn’t need to look at anything else with the baby before letting me go.
My internal alarms went off; I waited in that room for half an hour. It was cold, I was scared, I was nervous, I wanted to call Tom, but I knew someone would be in any minute. I thought maybe she had forgotten about me and kept telling myself that in five, maybe ten minutes I would get up and ask the receptionist, but after five, ten, fifteen minutes would pass I would find myself rooted to my chair unable to move. I think I knew what was coming, and I think I knew I hadn’t been forgotten either.
Finally the doctor came in. She introduced herself as Dr. Mahone. She was carrying a lot of papers. And one of the first things I remember her saying is that the heart has four chambers and I nodded my head absently, yes it does. Well, then she got out the diagram of what my babies heart had, thank goodness, he had four chambers as well, but in-between his left atrium and his right atrium there is suppose to be a wall to separate the oxygenated blood from the un-oxygenated blood. My baby has a big gaping hole in that wall. He will have to have surgery when he is born. The goal will be to get him healthy after his birth and strong enough to wait until he’s four to six months before performing the surgery.
This was about as far as we got. I sobbed. She didn’t tell me much more, she said that no matter what she said at this point I wouldn’t remember because I was in shock. But she wanted me to come back with my husband for an hour consultation and discuss the options of getting an amnio or not. I guess it’s common for congenital heart defects to be linked with downs syndrome as well.
I cried some more, every time I tried to talk I cried. It was overwhelming and I felt so alone right then.
Dr. Mahone leaned towards me and asked me this beautiful question. “Do you have faith?”
“Yes”, was my reply.
“Do you believe in Jesus?”
“Yes”.
“I know that Jesus is my Lord and Savior and yours, he is your brother and he loves you and he loves this baby, he will get you through this.”
Right then I knew that she was inspired to say these things, what more of a comfort could I have received at that time? She was speaking my language and it was touching.

Skip ahead.

So Wednesday Tom and I went back into the office to sit down with Dr. Mahone to discuss all the possibilities of what this meant for our family. Some of the main concerns and worries that stick out in my head the most and that were discussed are as follows:
1. We saw the video taken of the baby’s heart, and saw the hole. Shocking. There isn’t a wall, just a hole. The possibilities of this hole closing over or shrinking are exceptionally small; pretty much it would be a miracle if he did not need surgery. But to me, the miracle will happen no matter what, it will be a miracle that doctors can go in and fix him.
2. The possibility of taking the baby early. We were informed that babies with congenital heart defects often times don’t grow or thrive very well in the womb. If this happens, there is a possibility that he would have to be delivered at 35 or 36 weeks. So I feel a lot of pressure to do all I can to get this baby healthy, but then I worry that it won’t make a difference, no matter how well I eat or take care of myself, he just might not grow well. Out of my hands.
3. All of the pediatric cardiologists that are surgeons are in Iowa City, which is two hours East of Des Moines, which raises the possibility of delivering the baby there, and spending a lot of time going back and forth for appointments, and a good chunk of time for the actual surgery.
4. The possibility that if I deliver in Des Moines, the baby might need to be air evacuated to Iowa City if there are complications.
5. And another concern is for the two big brothers that will struggle when all this happens. How can I keep them close to me and not have them shipped off constantly for other people to watch? I worry that they’ll be shoved into the background when this little boy comes, and I really don’t want that.

So there is a brief run down, I could probably write a list of a hundred things that worry me, but I’ll spare you all.
After the consultation I went into the ultrasound room and we did the amnio. It was awful. Uncomfortable and disturbing.
Then we made an appointment for another ultrasound at the end of December and went home. So we get to play the waiting game. Answers will come slowly with each preceding appointment and consultation. We also need to be aware that more complications can arise with his heart as he grows and they can see more. So we’re taking it day by day and doing quite well really.

But skip ahead to Friday morning. I got the call from the lab at the doctor’s office for the amnio result. My heart was beating so hard and fast I thought I would drop dead right there. I didn’t. The nurse said good news, and it was, the results came back, and my baby is not down syndrome and he does not have digeorge. It was such a relief. I got off the phone and sobbed. I didn’t realize how much I had pent up until that moment.
The results certainly don’t change anything when it comes to all the worries of his heart, but it was a relief to not have any extra worries anymore.
So now we are just trying to get on with the everyday stuff. I’m finally getting around to vacuuming and cleaning up around the house again. It’s amazing how much the house can fall to pieces when you don’t clean for a week.
And Tom is doing well. In fact he spent the entire afternoon in the kitchen making sugar cookies yesterday and that was with fasting and all!
And we’re extremely grateful to all the people who have fasted and prayed for our little boy. There is no doubt in my mind that the Lord is aware of him and us and that no matter what the outcome is, we will be okay with Christ in our lives.