We are Thankful

Yay, I think I figured it out. We'll see when I try to check in again. You see I've been trying to change my background and been messing it up. Cynthia was right, aquapoppy does make it easy. :)

It's been almost a week since our last update and so here goes, in bullet form.

-After intense pain, by my judgement, and an ultrasound to figure out why, I had a cyst on my ovary burst. This would be my first time with one of these and there's nothing one can do about them. At least I know what was going on, and now I'm pain free.

-Water and sewer extras started coming out of our basement drains, on Friday night. $337 bucks later it was fixed.

-Sunday evening, our garbage disposal broke. Eric found out by seeing water in the basement. Monday night Eric replaced it and by 11 p.m. it was fixed and even better than before (replaced something electric). Way to go handyman!

-Noticed water dripping from above the back door from under the screened in porch. I'm hoping this trend stops and this house is no lemon. please.

-Avery has continued to not spit up food and the feeding tube is still in! The tubes are good for a month and I'll have to pull it out to change it, which will be a first. Avery is doing well. She is usually all smiles and happy (except when she is tired or I try to give her a bottle - what was I thinking?)

-Zachery is becoming quite verbal and I love that he is seeming so grown up, in some ways. He still acts silly and I love it.

-Eric was called to serve in our ward's bishopric as second counselor. The only difference here for me anyway, is he won't be able to sit with us during sacrament meeting to handle Zachery. 2 Sundays ago, Zach threw crayons at the podium (humiliations galore). I am optimistic, because there are, likely, 15 other women in our congregation who sit with their kids and no husband there, and do fine (or recover very well). :)

-I'm thankful for all of this! It means we have a house, we eat, we clothe ourselves, we have running water, that's usually filtered, and we're all together. That's better than many in this world.

Help. I tried to change my blog "wallpaper" and ended up losing all my links. How can I change the template to another?

Chim, chim-an-nee

I haven't much to write about, and that's good. Here is a few things that have been happening at our house.

-Our basement was cleaned, professionally, yesterday by a wonderfully chatty cleaning lady. The guys who did foundation work left a nice layer of dust on everything, but on their bill, it's gone now. We can breathe easy down there and enjoy our basement again.

-A small miracle it seems. Avery's feeding tube has NOT come out in a week! (knock on wood) Even if/when it does, I am now empowered with a great tip on how to put it back in, in 30 seconds.

-Lots of appointments. I encountered an appointment-scheduler-nazi today. I didn't want and really couldn't do a certain day & time for this appt. and she kept at it, until I conceeded. A few minutes later, after fuming, I called back to cancel the appt. I will not be bullyed into a time frame I don't want! Anyhoo. Really I just got the answering machine and they'll get it tomorrow. :)

-My youngest brother, Gary, is getting married this December to a great friend of his, Emmalee. They have been friends since the first grade. Gary is deaf and Emmalee is as well, although she hears better than Gary. Gary has graduated from college and has a nice job in SLC working for a TTY/video interpreting type of business. I am very proud of him and hoped all along that he would be able to be successful and have great friends. He is and he does. Congrats Gary and see you in December.

-Avery is starting OT, PT and speech therapy to help get her to where she needs to be. (like eating from a bottle).

-Discovering DVR

Happy Wednesday! Wednesday is the day of the week where people are most likely to get into fights/arguments. So, in high school, my dear friend, Aryn Fitzwater, came up with this idea in order to avoid fighting and boost our friendships. Make Wednesdays "Share Day" and each of us would take a turn and bring something to share with our group (about 8 of us). We brought anything from yo-yo's to candy, all inexpensive stuff, but fun.
So, in retrospect, I narrowly avoided an argument with the nazi-scheduler, but I should have shared something nice with her, a joke perhaps.

Jesse Bear

What a cute picture. My mom with Avery, before she went back to Colorado.
Happy as a lark sitting in her bouncer, eating and spitting bubbles tonight.
I love putting Zachery to bed. The whole bedtime routine of reading 3 stories, brushing teeth (I don't actually like that when he's refusing to brush), prayers and a song. Tonight I picked the books and saved our favorite for last, "Jesse Bear What Will You Wear?". It's a cute little rhyming story ending at bedtime. Well, tonight Zachery piped in at the end and said the last two lines of the story. Then, after he said his prayer, he reached for a bear and said, "I'll wear my bear, that's what I wear tonight." Oh, it was so cute, that I came back in and took a picture of him in bed, hence the bewildered look of Zach.
If you have a little boy, we reccommend this book by Bruce Degen.

Reminiscing

I was going through some photos I hadn't seen in a long time. Here are a few.
Old family photo, one that we love.
This was proof of our attempt to fly a kite. We kept trying, but you get what you pay for sometimes, and this was a dollar store kite. It was fun running around in the wind.
Zach is having a ball jumping on our bed, something he still loves to to.
This is what I found as I came out of our bathroom after Zach had run out after taking his bath.
Zachery loves his great grandma Marie! They are buddies and he makes her do all sorts of things when they play. How long will this still be able to happen?

Cute Bonnet

Now for something cute. We've been unpacking and trying to find spots to put stuff away in our house. Upon doing this, I came across a hand stitched bonnet I had purchased at a lace shop in Belgium. (I wanted to get a tablecloth, but it was way too much, so I got this cute bonnet for a girl I'd have someday.)
Yesterday we had a block party. It was really wet-humid, but nice to meet a lot of our neighbors. One of them asked the fire dept. to come over and so they did! Apparently you just have to call them and ask. Zach loved looking at the fire truck, but didn't want to turn on the water hose or get too close. Always cautious.


I am sick, sick, sick. Avery left the hospital taking 26 calorie formula, but that's not the sick part. They gave me a recipe to make it at home and I've been doing that for a week. I thought that it looked watery, but my mom and I checked and double checked the recipe. This week she has been losing weight. Yesterday I pulled out the recipe to make another day's batch of food and then I read this on the recipe, "to fortify breast milk"! What?! I am using formula, only. So this whole week, Avery's been having water with milk sprinkles (okay, not that bad, but about 13 calories. Normal milk has 20 calories. Soooo, that explains why Avery has slowly become lethargic and stopped smiling, because I've been starving her! I feel awful.

I called the hospital in MI and told them all about it, and a nutritionist finally called back and now I've got the right recipe. Poor Avery.

Home is where your heart is

Well, it's good to be home. This past week has been busy, sometimes hairy, but good. Avery got a simple head cold, but is doing alright with it. She is sleeping a lot, maybe catching up from the past month.

We have wooden floors here, thanks to Eric and help from others. One of the benefits of it, that you may not think of is being able to hear what your 3 yr. old is doing upstairs when he should be sleeping.

I know people love pictures here, so here goes. Remember, the house is new to us, we have come a long ways since we first got the keys and have a long ways to go still. :)

Zachery is happy to have us all home. Thursday was such a beautiful day here, we even roasted marshmallows in the backyard. (I love that we have one!)

It's hard to tell from this photo, but Zach refused to eat a roasted marshmallow from the fire, but, as he sooo wanted the treats, he stuck his marshmallows on a little twig and ate them that way. :)
The house is getting organized, slowly, but surely. My mom is right, with a house you can spend all of your weekends and money on it. :) My mom has been such a big help for us, getting us adjusted here. She painted our table, and it looks great!

Home

Avery had an MRI on Friday to check out a "bright spot". Right before, I'd called a friend, Katie Weber to see if she knew of someone who could come over and give Avery a blessing. Katie happened to be on U of M campus anyway and came across 3 people who were able to come with her to help give a blessing.

It turned out that the "bright spot" found in her echo-cardiogram was nothing!!!! We are so grateful. They said she could be discharged home that day, or wait til Saturday....so we ran around like crazy getting our stuff together and came home late on Friday night. Yay!

My mom was able to get a deal of a plane ticket and came out Thursday night and helped me out getting Avery home and we're getting adjusted to home life again.

Avery had a temp on Friday night and part of Sat., and was a bit miserable, but now she is doing better and smiling again. The infection from her incision is basically gone. It isn't open much anymore. The nurse practioner who discharged Avery told me that she was surprised Avery had improved so quickly, thinking the wound-vac would have been on for another week at least. That's surely a blessing from heaven to have her infection heal so quickly from how it started out.

All of us are happy to home together again. Zachery freaked out on Friday night when I went outside, thinking I was leaving again. He told me today that he was so glad I was home. :) I am too.

Thank you to all of you who watched Zach, especially Eric's mom, Sue. I surely do not know what I would have done without the help, prayers and general support of others. Phone calls, notes, comments all meant a lot to us.

Avery will get to grow up a little before we'll need to take her back for a final fix on her heart. Now we get adjusted and get our house in order!

Not Quite Yet

Avery had her exit echo cardiogram today. The doctor on the floor this week said they saw a "bright spot" in her left pulmonary artery (takes the blood from the heart to the left lung). They are going to do an MRI tomorrow about 1:00 to find out what it is, it it's anything. If it's a clot they will give her coumadin to thin things out. That will take time to get her level of coumadin up, before she could go home. This is all better than if it is a clot and it has to be taken out, surgically. It could be nothing. Sooo, if you're reading this before Friday at 12:40 p.m., please pray that the "bright spot" is nothing, or easily handled.

Up and down over and sideways, that's the road sometimes. They're having free haircuts at the RMH tonight. That's cool at least. :)

Coils

Avery and I in front of the light and bubble machine in the playroom on our floor.
Here is a better picture of the machine. I'll bring Avery in and she will watch it wide eyed.
Today was another good day. Avery's incision is looking better and better each time I see it. It was still fairly yucky on Tuesday, and already tonight it looks tons better.
In the morning, Avery will have her picc-line taken out of her liver and they'll place a coil in it to help clot it off to stop it from bleeding. Kind of weird. The coil will stay in her liver (and I even consented). :)

I heard from Eric today that Zachery told him, that he pulled the kitty's tail and had to sit in time out. We don't have a kitty, but the Jeppesen's do. Sorry Alisha. Sometimes I think Zach feels like it's okay to do something if he just recognizes it was a bad choice and sometimes he'll put himself in time-out. Hmmm, still working on that.

Zach did blow me a kiss over the phone tonight. :)

One of these Photos is not like the Others

Picture #3: Do you see what's not there? Today, the wound-vac machine was beeping and not drawing out anything. I asked if they could change the dressing and....there was no more bubbling discharge!!!! The wound-vac is off and she has wet-to-dry dressing, and if it continues to go well, then possibly we could scoot home on Friday! I am the happiest of all happy people right now! Her trans hepatic picc line will likely come out tomorrow too. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. :)

Picture #2: This is what our deary looked like this morning. She had spit up and the tube had come out, so...a nurse practioner decided to just pull the tape off her face, and this is what happened.
Picture #1: Avery likes to stretch and so some mental "hoorays". (before tube came out)

Also, yesterday my brother and sister in law, Dave and Leah came up for a visit. They brought their 5 week old sweet little baby James too (obviously). He is so precious and it was fun to visit with them. Thanks for coming!