Life In The Country: Our Blessings

Seeing as we have 4 days left in June (ahhhhh) I thought I'd do a walk down memory lane on each of our 4 kids.

So here goes.

I know that I will never ever forget the day that Andrew Joshua was born.

I woke up Sunday morning, bleeding, we called our moms and then our midwife and headed to the hospital.

They checked me and I was 3 cm dilated, and only 29 weeks and 5 days.

After talking to the Dr I was taken into the city in the ambulance, a 2 hour drive. Ill never forget leaving Josh and going by myself, he followed in our car, this is not how we had planned for things to go!

After 2 days in the hospital they decided that the baby wasn't going to wait, so on Wednesday November 4 2009 at 5:10 pm, Andrew was born.

He was taken away by a staff of 6 nurses and Drs and I didn't get to see him till over 2 hours later.

This was the first time I saw him, my heart was crying on the inside, this is not what babies are supposed to look like!! There should be mommy snuggle time, not tubes and wires everywhere!

At first we were told that we might be staying for 5-6 weeks, we could probably be home for Christmas, as it turned out that wasn't the case. November passed, then December and January, each week they tried something new to get Andy to stop throwing up through his nose, which in turn cause him to stop breathing.

Andrew being fed, they had to put in his feeding tube for every feeding cause no matter what they tried he would always pull it out! All of the nurses commented on it! :)

After 2 months of waiting we finally got the call to go see the Dr. Ill never forget walking to his office, the feeling of relief, knowing that they had found out what was wrong and the feeling of dread, not knowing what my baby would have to face, were overwhelming!

We were told that Andrew had 22 q deletion syndrome, but the reason it had taken them so long to find it was because he didn't have any heart problems or a cleft lip, both of which are 2 major signs of this syndrome.

Needless to say we were beyond thankful that he had been spared of those two issues, but we now also had to face that symptoms that he did have, the major one being a small hole in the back of his pallet, which was causing him to throw up through his nose instead of his mouth.

The hole was to small for them to do surgery so all we could do was wait for it to grow closed enough, and we were getting pretty good at that! :)

Andy back on the CPAP, he was very prone to getting infection and so it seemed that the first month and a half of his life he would be good one day, and then we would come back the next and he had gotten sick again, more often than not I would leave the hospital crying because it seemed like my baby would never get better!

But through everything we always felt the prayers and support of our family and friends!

Some other symptoms were that he didn't have a very strong immune system, which caused him to be sick a lot the first year of his life, and he is still the first of our kids to get sick and then last to get rid of it too. Also he would probably be shorter than most people, and he might be slow in school.

I don't know about being short, but I know he's not slow!!

It was such a relief to know what we were dealing with now, and to be able to set goals for him.

He needed to go 3 days with out dropping in his oxygen stats, and then he needed to pass the car seat test, 3 hours in the carseat with no problems breathing. I don't know how many times we counted the days, and how many times we made it to day 2 and then Grampa came and heald him and he would desat (not breath properly) :)