Happy Thanksgiving & 6 Years Ago Today

I wanted to wish everybody a HAPPY THANKSGIVING today! We're spending it with Tim's family this year and we're at his twin sister, Carrie's house. All but one of his siblings is going to be here (she's in Egypt, but has decided to come home soon). And of course, I forgot my camera :(

BUT, the main reason I wanted to post today was to write about "The Call."

I mentioned that Emmes birthday is a little different for me because I wasn't there for her actual birth...but we ended up with several other days to remember and celebrate.

Thanksgiving fell on the 28th six years ago, so it was the day before Thanksgiving. We had been living in Grand Junction, CO for just over two months and had just finished our Foster Care licensing requirements two weeks before. We were actually licensed as Therapeutic Foster Parents through a private agency who dealt with "High Needs" children (typically ones who had been bounced around in the system) and we were planning on taking a child between the ages of 5 and 10 (and I have NO IDEA what we were thinking!!!).

I was mopping the kitchen floor in our apartment when the phone rang. We were expecting a call, but I wasn't expecting to be asked if we were interested in a new born. Our agency hadn't placed a newborn in the entire 13 years they had been in business. And, even less expected, it was a girl! OF COURSE I was interested! She was at the hospital where Tim was working at the time so I called him and told him to meet me at the nursery. I loaded Tristen and Jarek up and ran to the hospital. When we got there I was expecting to see her through the nursery window, but she wasn't there. Tim went in and told the nurses who we were and they told him she was in the NICU and only one of us could go back at a time. Tim went first, which I still don't think was fair! And it seemed like FOREVER before he came back out. When he did, he told me she was tiny. She was already 8 days old but had been born 5 weeks early. I went in and got to see her for the first time and she was definitely tiny! At 4lbs 9oz she was the smallest baby I had ever held (literally 1/2 of Jarek's birth weight). She had all of these tubes and monitors attached to her, but she was beautiful and I fell in love with her immediately. I didn't get to stay long because her birthmother was supposed to be coming back soon and they hadn't informed her yet that she was being placed in foster care, so they didn't want her to see me with her. We told them we'd be back first thing in the morning, so I spent Thanksgiving that year running back and forth between the hospital and our apartment to make dinner. I got to bathe her that evening and she had the worst diaper rash I had ever seen that was due to the alcohol moving through her system. It was just like an open wound on her little bum. She had been on oxygen since she was born and they didn't want to send her home until she was breathing on her own for 24 hours, so they took her off of it that day. It was so scary taking home that tiny baby the next day. I stopped twice during the 10 minute drive to check on her. The boys both had colds so I hid her out in our bedroom for most of her first week. We only left the house for Dr's appointments and visits with her birthmother (who only showed up maybe 1/2 of the time) the first few weeks. She was doing well for a couple of weeks, but then she started spitting up -- a LOT. We were at the pediatricians office pretty much every day over the next couple of weeks and watching her very closely. It got to the point where she lost a couple of ounces overnight and they knew something was wrong. Her pediatrician had suspected that she had Hypertrophic Pyloric Stenosis, which is when the muscle between the stomach and intestine is too large and won't allow food to pass through. They sent us to the hospital and did an Upper GI (I don't remember what that stands for) and could see that very little food was passing through to her stomach. The next day we went back for our regular daily trip to the pediatrician and her usual pediatrician was gone for Christmas. The pediatrician filling in for him seemed almost excited to actually feel an olive sized lump in her stomach. That confirmed that she did have Pyloric Stenosis and would have to have surgery (apparently it's hard to find the lump in most cases). We were so blessed to learn that a Pediatric Surgeon who had actually written an article on Pyloric Stenosis and had it published lived and worked in Grand Junction (what are the chances?) However, she was the first girl he had ever done the operation on. It's typically first-born baby boys who come down with it, but as her Dr. said, she hadn't read the text books. They did the surgery on the 22nd of December. Everything went well and they let us take her home the next day. She immediately started to do better, but the next two years would end up being much harder than we had ever imagined.... more on that some other time.