Sunday, September 22, 2013

What a difference a year makes!

Sooooo, it's been almost a year since I was last here. It's honestly been one of the most difficult but blessed years of my life.

















It all started last September when our son came home from deployment.




We got him all settled back into civilian life and began to look forward to the holidays when I suddenly discovered with a shock that I was pregnant again! We could not believe it. After all, it was only a few months since we had lost our precious angel that we had been anticipating so much. After the loss I decided that I was done having babies and that it was time to focus on being a mom to our children and a grandmother to my step grandbabies. God had other plans for us though.....


I wish I could say that I had a nice relaxing and enjoyable pregnancy but I didn't. I worried and fretted and feared and generally found myself lacking in faith the entire time. I quit college even though I was only 5 classes away from graduating. I exercised and ate a healthy diet, drank red raspberry leaf tea, and rested and took my vitamins, all the extra calcium the doctor told me to take, and even a baby aspirin every day. I made it all the way to 37 weeks and 3 days and the doc decided to induce. Well, the induction didn't go well from the start and I should have known right then that we just weren't ready. They just kept pushing it with the oxytocin maxed out however, and I finally gave birth to a 7 pound, 14 ounce baby girl at 11:05 pm on May 28th. She had a little breathing problem and was taken down to the nurses station for observation. Around 5 am the pediatrician on-call came in to tell us that the baby was showing respiratory distress and that they were going to transport her to the NICU at Shand's in Jacksonville.

We then endured a ten-day nightmare that included discovering that our new baby girl had immature lungs even though she was a term baby. She ended up with four doses of surfactant, the maximum they could give.   She then proceeded to blow a pneumothorax and had to have a drainage tube inserted. Eventually she came around and was able to come home but that was a terrible experience that I never want to go through again.

A few weeks before the baby's birth, my husband lost his job. He was unsuccessful at finding another one in our home area and to make a long story short we had to move our entire family all the way to Texas where he found a new job. Well, our entire family except our oldest son, who is a Georgia Guardsman and decided to stay there. Fortunately, we were able to find a house in a town where the oil boom has caused a housing shortage and the drought has caused a shortage of water but there are plenty of jobs.

I thought everything would calm down and we would all settle in nicely but two weeks after moving into our new house, the baby contracted pneumonia. She was so very sick and ended up losing more than a pound in a week due to the severe diarrhea she had from the antibiotic she was given. Over and over again, I wished for the strong medical team we were blessed with in Florida. It was absolutely the worst time of helplessness I have ever experienced in my 20 years of being a mother.


During this time my oldest daughter decided that it was time for her to move away from the nest and she moved all the way up to Maine! I was happy for her yet sad for myself because I knew I was going to miss her a lot. It was such a weird feeling for me, being separated from my two oldest children while at the same time worrying so much about my littlest ones. It was like being an empty nest parent and a new parent all at once.  I was totally and completely dependent on God to get through this terrible time of emotional and physical stress.

We did get through it though and the baby is finally on the right track. In fact she weighs almost 20 pounds at 16 weeks of age and is the happiest, most content, and smiling baby I have ever seen. All of our other children have been real troopers too. Even though its been difficult, I have thanked Jesus for my kiddos over and over again in the past 4 months.

Hopefully now we can all relax and learn to like it here in our new environment.

It sure has been a big change.

We are starting our new homeschool year with a lot of challenges but no matter what happens to us I have learned in the past four months that God is good, He loves us so much, and He stays with us through everything we ever experience whether good or bad. Even in the darkest days we can have that to be thankful for!


Thanks for visiting!

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