We made it HOME!

We got to take Faith home on Wednesday. She is doing great! Thanks so much for all of your prayers. PTL!

And the Million Dollar Question Is....

When do we get to go home? Faith is doing great. The nurses took out her nasal feeding tube on Saturday and she has been nursing ever since. The Dr's want to be sure she consistently gains weight while nursing before they send us home. Saturday night she gained 5 grams, tonight she gained another 10 grams (30 grams to an ounce), sounds pretty consistent to us, but I think the doctors want to see a gain of more than 10 grams. God has been good. Lots of prayers have been answered, and we have been blesses with some awesome nurses. They tell us she is on the fast track to go home and can't believe she only been here a month. ONLY a Month!! Do they know how long a month away from home is?!!

Welcome to Holland!

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

by Emily Pearl Kingsley

"I am often asked to describe an experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it,

to imagine how it would feel. It's like this:

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo "David", the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland".
"Holland? you say. "What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
"But there has been a change in the flight plan.

They've landed in Holland, and there you must stay."

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, filthy place, full of famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you must buy new guidebooks.

And you must learn a whole new language.

And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there a little while, you look around and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
The pain of that will never, ever go away,

because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.
But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

I wanted to share this wonderful poem with you..... My great friend Jamie Mouw shared this with me after Elizabeth was diagnosed with CF. When ever I'm having a down or hard day, I read this to remind me of the great joy I have found in "Holland"!

God has placed a few special families in our life's who have been to "Holland" and back again. To see how God places people in our life's way before the storm comes is sooo awesome! So thank you Lord for that wonderful gift! And thanks to our dear friends Phil and Judy and Lance and Jamie for your friendship, support and love!

Long over due update!

Sorry there hasn't been any updates lately! This past week I think it all caught up with me and the mommy adrenaline was withering away! To think of what to post just made me tired...but today I'm refreshed and ready to go!

Faith continued to be a star with her lung issues! She has impressed many, but I continue to remind the docs it's b/c soooooo many people were praying for her! Faith decided at two weeks old that she didn't want to be on oxygen any more and pulled off her own nasal cannula! And she did really well, this girl knows what she wants! God is good!

She contines to show progress everyday in her breathing rates, they are still a bit fast but way more under control now. The next step now becomes getting her to eat well. Sometimes CDH babies have a hard time with nippling but Faith takes the binki, bottle and nursing well! One more thing to thank the Lord for! Although she is nursing good she wasn't quite getting enough calories, so on Friday they decided to put the feeding tube back in to help her catch up. Today she is nursing and then following up with 30ml through the feeding tube. Hopefully in a couple days she will be nursing well enough to take out the feeding tube.

Sleeping Beauty

Bath Time!

Grant and Olivia got to help with Faith's bath, they each got one leg! We had to be fair!

Just a few cry's during bath time. Her cry kind of sounds like a little lamb:)

Faith lungs are doing GREAT! One of the head Dr's commented today that she is very impressed with Faith's latest chest x-ray that showed lots of expansion in her left lung! And we(the docs) don't see this happen often in CDH babies!!
I think we all need to give a BIG shout out to our Maker the GREAT Physician!
So now that her lungs are well on their way our next hurdle will be starting feeds and getting the digestion to work properly. Faith did start some tube feedings on Thursday, she seemed to be doing well until 12pm Friday morning. She was uncomfortable and they gave her a small dose of morphine. This helps the pain but slows the gut! She then got a little backed up and the doctors stopped feeds for 24 hours. She now is getting Tylenol for any pain and we started bottle feeds again this afternoon! Please pray with us that she will be able to digest her food well and that she will continue to be a good eater! A good eater leads to weight gain. All these things together get us that much closer to going home:)

A quick note on Elizabeth, she still is fighting off the cold but starting to sound better. It just takes her twice a long as you and I to get over a cold. So keep praying for her as well!