A Simple Christmas

A friend called me in early December and asked, 

"What do you do since you don't celebrate Christmas?"

Over the last 25 years of married life, we have celebrated most holidays in pretty much every conceivable way. For Halloween, we have full blown trick or treated, visited shut-ins, gone to the nursing home (my personal favorite), harvest festivals, and ignored it altogether. Thanksgiving has seen us with others and alone, serving, visiting, family. At Christmastime, Santa came because we sprinkled reindeer food and left out cookies and milk for Dad. We've stayed up past midnight assembling and wrapping many a year which turned into a special time for my husband and I to talk and reflect. 

However, over the last five years, Christmas for our family has begun to evolve into what we hope honors the One who was born for our eternal salvation.

Honestly, some of this happened out of necessity. With an adoption, a baby, or a new kid each year, Christmas got overwhelming for me. Fast. And the excess of it all? The truth is, it depresses me while so many people on this earth don't even have clean water to drink or food to eat.

We have simplified the way we do Christmas to 

encourage a spirit of giving rather than receiving.

One year we bought our one and only flat screen TV. 

And we donated an equal amount to charities.

Last year we plopped down three $100 bills and told the kids they could do whatever they wanted but they had to all agree. 

The money bought mosquito nets for children in Mali, Africa to combat malaria.

One year we only put popcorn, cranberries, and lights on our tree.

This year, we drew names and bought a few stocking gifts. 

And that was all. 

The kids loved shopping for each other.

I would be the first to admit it has been a rugged season, for me personally, fostering three babies in three years and integrating two medically fragile children into our family while learning to simultaneously parent all ages.

Simplifying Christmas has given me margin.

We can enjoy and celebrate the true gifts that God has given us.

We were able to take time the weekend before Christmas to have biological siblings overnight and help out where no one else would. 

Overflowing gifts under the tree? That is what my friend really meant when she asked me about Christmas. What do we substitute for the "stuff"? 

For our family, I hope December has become a season of giving and remembering how blessed we are to have a Savior AND each other.

The best present of all?
Pure Joy. 

Wouldn't you agree?

The Perfect Tree

Finding the perfect tree is quite an event 

when you have a lot of opinions large family.

 The truth is, 

Daddy has the final say.

Always.

'Cause picking the tree is his thing.

And it doesn't have to be perfect,

it only has to be right.

 This one....had no idea what we were doing.

 A kind man allowing us to tromp his field.

 My brother and nephew came along, a true family affair.

 Remember when we used to do THIS all the time?

Merry Christmas!

We were blessed to have everyone home for Christmas. How many more times will that happen? 

Before Lindsey went back to the land of cows and Jerrod took off shredding, I begged a picture of ten.

We scoured the house for red, white, and black.  Think tossing drawers, digging through dirty laundry, and borrowing to make it somehow work. 

 Traditional!

 Their choice to tough up and be outside!  

We used a package of M&M's for bribery warmth.

  I woefully need camera lessons. But the pose was awesome!

Behind the scenes: 

texting, a wanderer, coldness, boredom.  

Real life!

Coats on, coats off.

Getting pretty cold now.

Oldest to youngest.

Love came down at Christmastime...

And glory filled the earth!

Merry Christmas 2012

Giving Thanks

I am feeling the poignancy of the holidays deeply this year. Life is changing a bit more quickly with the kids getting older and moving on with their own lives. It's been a wild ride this year and the pace hasn't slowed down much with all the Joy happenings over the last few months. My oldest knew I was needing a pick-me-up and delighted us by coming home for three whole days over Thanksgiving. A surprise because dairy farmers don't spend a whole lot of time resting!

 Look who was in charge of breakfast!

 On second thought, probably better not to look.

 Some can pull it off, others.....not so much!

We were blessed to be invited to a friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner. I was very grateful not to host or cook this year. May God find great favor on the people who invite a family of twelve over.

 When Jerrod wears the hat, we call him green bean. 

He's sportin' it quite a bit since he went Marine on us.

Joy's very first Thanksgiving. We are thankful for her life and for how easily she has become a treasured member of our family.

I LOVE this picture for all sorts of reasons. All ten together for a whole day is a mother's gift. The personalities, the siblings, how they came and who they are, completely represented here.

 We tried the jumping off the wall pictures. 

Some knew what we were trying to do and some clearly didn't.

Yeah, that didn't work so well.

 The point is this:

 The youngest and oldest definitely get all the photo glory.

 Especially with a handsome hat from the dress up bin.

 But little girls are pretty cute in overalls and piggy tails.

 And  a five year old who dances down the wall

 sporting a gap in the smile is practically irresistible.

Back to the youngest? 

He wins the most-pictures-award. 

Hands down! 

We have much to be thankful for.

November 22, 2012

The Hard Road - Part VI - The End of the Beginning

Before I begin, I will tell you the end of the story.

We don't know.

The doctors don't know.

Nobody knows.

But God knows.

How hard and how long the road will be for precious Joy. 

Between Wednesday night and Thursday we had four visits with the Boston pulmonary hypertension cardiologists and their nurse practitioner. Each of them spent well over 30 minutes with us and answered every question we could think of. Because we saw them individually we felt good about getting each of their personal opinions on a treatment plan for Joy. One of the doctors, Mary Mullen, had been consulted and already knew Joy on paper so it was nice to meet her, especially since we may land in her office down the road.

One thing we decided to do was an unofficial sleep study by trying Joy off oxygen this last night in the hospital where she could be monitored. Who knew but sleep apnea contributes to pulmonary hypertension. I was still awake around 11:30 when those oyygen numbers took a nosedive and the heart rate jumped. Less than one minute later the nurse was in putting Joy's oxygen cannula back in. The nurse wasn't messing around with that at all. She had seen enough. Joy slept through the whole thing and stabilized after awhile.

By Thursday morning, Joy had only one small IV left. She amazed me by peddling the tricycle all the way around the loop at the hospital. We are still discovering what she can and can't do. This was a very nice surprise as her gross motor skills are a bit behind.

We had to keep the IV because in order to go home she had to give up some blood, go for another chest x-ray and then a lung scan. They injected some radioactive stuff and took pictures. Joy was a trooper and the medical staff sure appreciated her easy going nature.

Once the lung scan was done, we had a meeting with the PH doctor and his nurse practitioner together for about 45 minutes. While we were waiting, the clowns showed up to entertain us. 

All of the Boston doctors were great about not making us feel like we had to choose or change cardiologists based on what we had learned during our adventure here. They said we could use them as much or as little as we wanted. They seemed genuinely happy to help us in any way. They gave us their protocols for medications, opinions on home oxygen use, and a few recommendations for the future. 

After our meeting, the nurse took out the last IV, did our paperwork, and got us out of there. Last stop was a good bye visit with our friend Ivy Joy and a walk down the hall together.

We packed up, paid for parking, and headed out of town. 

Halfway home, we stopped at Panera for dinner where Joy saw her first snow. I wish I had caught a picture of her face. She was NOT impressed. 

I realized over the last two days in Boston that 24/7 oxygen was depressing Joy. She is so developmentally behind and keeping her tethered to a machine was not helping her expand her horizons as quickly as she wanted to. The Boston doctors could not definitely tell us if the oxygen was necessary. We know it helps therapuetically but I questioned the need if her saturation levels were at 98% while she was sitting around the house. Once we followed up with our own cardiologist, we agreed to try Joy on oxygen only at night and naps for now and promised to keep track of the frequency of the "blue spells" that you can see in the picture above. 

Her delightful personality is back en force and Joy is loving life again with sugar and spice. She had a big language jump while we were in Boston and we were delighted to find out that she knows quite a few more words than we realized. She has added "thank you", "yummy", and "night-night" to her list which also includes potty, hello, bye-bye, and kitty. Of course, if you added all of our names, the list doubles.

We met with our cardiologist two weeks later and immediately scheduled a sleep study. Fortunately, she rolled with it beautifully. She was pretty used to the wires and the cannula so she fell right asleep. Looks like our girl has some moderate sleep apnea. We are waiting to find out what's next in that department. We also saw the endocrinologist this week and are scheduled to see a geneticist very soon. Because of this new development, I don't think we can claim "stable" quite yet but Joy is definitely holding her own for the time being. We will continue to tweak her meds and she will have another cath sometime in the next 7-9 months. We know that we added some years to Joy's life by inserting the occluder but nobody knows how many or is even willing to guess.

Thank you for being part of our journey with Joy, for the prayers on her behalf and the support of our family. We are grateful to be together as a family with children who are enjoying an excellent quality of life.

These truly are the best days of my life!