Home Sweet Home

We are finally getting settled back in at our house as I am sure you have presumed by now. I apologize for not posting sooner. Our internet connection was not cooperating well at all and today was the first chance I had to work on it. For some reason I could not get to our blog page or Avery's email account attached to the webpage. Anyway, looks like all is working again right now. Where to start... We arrived home on Wednesday afternoon to a great surprise. Our living room carpet had been replaced with new and the hole in our ceiling plaster had been repaired and the whole ceiling painted. We were so surpised and delighted at this! It was all completed and financed by some friends at our church. How thoughful and generous. Thank you all so much! The house had also been cleaned by two of our great friends. Again, such a wonderful thing to come home to. Thanks ladies! It was just so great to finally be home. Caiden started back to school on Thursday. All his classmates were so happy to see him! They were sayong, "Caiden we missed you" and were hugging him. I was so glad to see that...to see that he was made to feel special if even for a moment. It is so great that he has his own place in the world now with school. I think he missed it more than he realized while we were gone. Now, we will have to play catch up for a bit but we don't mind. It's getting so cold out and dark earlier now that we need to find more stuff to do indoors in the evening anyway. Avery continues to do about the same right now. We saw her Developmental Pediatrician on Thursday and brought her up to speed with everything from the surgery and shared our remaining concerns. She is setting up a GI consult for her...hopefully that will occur this week. They will likely do a scope to determine if there is definitly reflux or some sort of stomach irritation. It will be nice to know one way or the other. The bottom line is that if there is then what we are treating her with now is not working for it and we need to do something else; if neither of those seem to be a problem, then we need to stop giving her meds that aren't neccesitated and figure out what is the source of her uncomfortableness. We tried changing her formula again to the Promote that her Diatician had tried to put her on before surgery (she promptly had bigger badder seizures on it so we took her off and put her back on the Similac), but she had been more unhappy the past couple days so we nixed that today and went back to the Soy Similac that we started out in Baltimore a few days before heading home. We'll see if she improves any from that tomorrow. Right now it is just so frustrating to see her so uncomfortable for most of the day and be helpless to do anything that gives her relief. Nothing seems to work with any consistancy and she is not sleeping well. Only about 3-4 hours at night and maybe takes a couple 1-2 hours naps during the day. She is exhausted...and so are we! Something has to give for our poor baby. We are praying for answers and quidance throughout the day. Please pray with us for that too. We got to spend some time with Dad and Linda on Saturday and it was so nice to see them. They drove up to spend a couple hours with us and to see Avery with their own eyes, as so many are eager to do. We enjoyed the visit very much. We returned to church today after being gone for six weeks. It was so very nice to be back! We had missed everyone so much. Avery and Dad had to watch from the TV in the Welcome Center though because Avery was not settled enough to be in the sanctuary with us. Hopefully soon she can go to the infant room while we are in study and worship. We may try next week if Joyce feels up to the task of caring for her through all the screaming and arching. Thanks to all for making us so welcome to be back and thanks for all your words of encouragement and prayers. Thank you Mom for spending 6 weeks with us in Baltimore and putting your life on hold. We really do appriciate it. And thanks to all our friends and family who have worked so hard to provide and take care of us while we were gone. For your kindness and generosity we will be forever grateful. We look forward to seeing many of you over the Thanksgiving weekend. I'm sure that I am forgetting something, but I have to attend to Avery right now as she is quite unhappy at the moment. Until later, thanks for you love and friendship. All my love, Holly