Sadness and Joy

This is Mark, this evening I have the privilege of posting the events of our family life together.

This morning we went to see John's new audiologist, another friendly and helpful lady who is taking care of John's hearing aids, and we made new molds of the inside of his ears to make better fitting ear pieces as John continues to grow in all ways. This was a normal and good part of the day.

Following this we went to see the OB-Gyn for Gina, for we have been celebrating the life that was growing within her for the past week. Yet our joy in this was to be short for now, and yet will be, by God's grace in Christ, eternal. The child she was carrying within her for the past 8-9 weeks left us to return to the Lord who had given this precious little one life. There is no way to know if our baby was a boy or girl, yet we are not going to let this child go unnamed and unremembered. We have chosen to name the baby Katherine, in honor of Gina's mom who, through all the joy and now sorrow, has been there for us with wisdom, encouragement, and hope, even when we had none.

While this is a sad and heart-breaking day it has come also with notes of that eternal joy that I wrote above. When we told John that the baby we had been praying for all week was now in heaven, he signed 'baby with Jesus' and smiled at us. Such profound and simple faith speaks volumes. Even as tears fall, threatening to short out the keyboard, I can be as confident as King David who, while grieving the loss of his unnamed son, said, 'he will not come back to me, I will go to him.' In this way I can commend Katherine into the gracious hands of her loving Savior, Jesus Christ, knowing that we shall meet face to face and eye to eye someday and share the love eternally that we had hoped to here in this life. And if at that point we find that our baby girl is a baby boy I am sure he will forgive us and still love us.

New Wheels

Not too very long after I posted the Happy Thanksgiving post we got a phone call from the chair place telling us that John's power chair would be here at 2pm. We had gotten a letter the week before telling us that it had been ordered and would be in within the next 4 weeks, so of course we didn't have any ramps built. Mark quickly built 3 ramps to get John's chair in the house and the adventure has been on ever since.

I was very impressed with John, he's only gotten to drive a power chair 3 times, and those were only chairs that were similar to this one, not exactly the same, and the last time that he had driven one was months and months ago. No more had his little bottom been planted in the seat than he reached over and turned it on and was ready to drive. The chair needed a few adjustments and you can see that he has a wrench in his hand and was helping.

An hour or so of adjustment making and a trip up the 3 new ramps that his daddy built and he was ready to terrorize, uh I mean, drive in the house. He is very good at this and is getting better each time he is in it, but that doesn't mean that he's exactly getting safe driving awards yet. We did realize that the chair was heavy enough and had enough torgue that we can't push it and it can certainly push many other things, but he's getting better and there hasn't been any permanent damage to chair, structures, pedestrians or pooches.

It is giving him the freedom that we hoped for and as he gets better at driving it that will only increase. Before the chair John would be playing computer, or something and get done and have to holler and fuss to get our attention to move him, with the chair he can come and get us and tell us that he's ready for something else to do, or even go and find that something else himself. He is still getting in his gait trainer and walking, and holding our hands and walking through the house, and scooting around too, but this adds a whole other dimension to his mobility.



And of course today was new haircut day for my favorite guys, so I could resist showing them off!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We find this year that we have many things to be thankful for...



...good friends.

John's godparents came to visit this month and what a great time we had. It was so nice to get to visit, to enjoy seeing how grown up our sweet goddaughter is now, and just be together for a while. John had a great time with the kids here and he was sad to see them leave. Somehow our house is just much quieter without the godcousins swirling around, with no trains in the kitchen and no little girls that like to play playdoh for hours and no little boys running hither and yon. We look forward to getting to go and see them, and whenever they get back this way, it's always fun to be together.



...a little boy who is doing great and getting bigger and better all the time.

We just got home from John's check-up in Omaha yesterday. I must say that even with the good news of his appointment the very best part of any trip to Nebraska is staying with the Baker's. We will be returning in a couple weeks just to hang out and play at their house for the weekend of John's birthday - he will be so excited, and so will we!

John's appointment news is very good. He has actually gained weight, about .25 kilos, not as much as anyone would like him to gain, but it's in the right direction and the docs/team have a plan to help him gain more. These kids are so much trial and error, but it's comforting to know that the experts have more ideas and listen to ours too. John's height portion of the growth chart is still nearly a straight line up since arriving in Omaha, he's now 38 inches tall, his weight on the other hand looks like a hook, having gone up and now sliding back down, hopefully it will turn more into a roller coaster soon! We are going to be trying prune juice to manage the constipation, as both they and we want him off the Miralax, the kid just doesn't need more drugs in his body if we can avoid them. At any rate John is doing so well that he doesn't have another appointment for 6 weeks and actually gets to have labs done every other week this time.

...a new life to celebrate and share.

We found out last week why I have been so tired that I can't manage to do much, including update the blog, I'm pregnant. It feels surreal to write that down and it mean me, Mark and I have been married for almost 14 years and never thought that we'd ever see a positive pregnancy test but last week the test went positive so fast I never even had a chance to set it down. We did find a high-risk pregnancy ob/gyn in Columbia, I'm 42 and overweight, our first appointment with the nurse is on Monday and then we see the doctor on the 17th of December. We are guessing that the baby should be due in early July, but are looking forward to the first ultrasound so that we can see if our guess is good or off. I never realized that my whole body would feel pregnant, I also never realized what tired really meant. We have told John that he is going to be a big brother, and I'm not sure just how much he gets it, his first reaction was 'baby play playdoh', can't wait until we can show him his new baby brother or sister. We are excited, shocked, amazed and most of all thankful that God has blessed us with this little life.

Can You See It Now Dad?

Tonight while John and I were in his room reading books his daddy called while on the road coming home from visiting members in the hospital and so I put Mark on speaker phone so John could hear him too. After John waved 'hi' to him, and signed to him that he loved him, then he started rapidly signing for his daddy to read the book to him and grabbed up the phone and turned it so that daddy could 'see' the book through the phone screen. For probably the next 5 minutes or so it was my job to change the pages and at each change of page John would hold the phone over the new pages, making sure to get it really close to the most interesting parts of the pictures so that his daddy could see.

After that it was time for John and I to start getting supper together, and so my little helper came into the kitchen with me. He supervised while I cut the veggies, helped measure things out, but then he really helped with the sauteing of the veggies for the chicken rice soup.



John helps to scramble eggs almost every morning, so when I asked him to please stir the veggies so that I could get other things done in the kitchen he took the job quite seriously and did a fantastic job at it. I was so impressed. He would pull himself up with the oven handle, stand and stir for a bit, then sit down and watch the pan, when it got really bubbly he would stand up and stir it again. We had perfectly sauteed veggies and I really only intervened a time or two - I am constantly amazed at how much actual help John is.

John has been learning to sign the common table prayer, and I've noticed that since he's started that he's been stringing more signs together and is even making up his own little sentences. Things that he used to have us spell out in books for him he now points to the letters and spells them out for us. He makes sure that his monkey or whichever animal is nearby sees all the pictures in his books, and often uses their hands to sign about what is going on in the book. I sometimes worry that we aren't doing enough formal school, but really he is learning every day and so I guess we are just going to keep doing what we are doing.

One of the things that we like to do is play games, Hi Ho Cherry O is one of John's favorites, and this time it was Raggedy Andy's job to help play.







Tonight for Halloween, or the Great Chocolate Harvest as it is commonly called on the Loopers list, John walked around in the driveway giving out candy to every kid that came by. This is his first time to be home and feeling good for Halloween ever and he really enjoyed getting to see the kids in the costumes and liked giving them candy. Of course he had a great time eating some of it himself! After he had eaten one small Hershey bar he wanted another and I told him that he could have it tomorrow. He started into the house, took one look at his father, and stuffed tomorrow's candy bar inside of his coat, as if to hide it. I don't think we've laughed so hard in a long time.

Walking with one crutch...

...and a bit of help. Who was doing that? Why John of course. The crutch was teeny tiny, and yet way too tall for him, but he immediately understood exactly what to do with it and needed only a little balance help and support on the other side where the other crutch belongs. His new physical therapist wholeheartedly agrees with one of our favorite old pt's who is adamant that John will eventually walk unassisted. For now we are looking forward to next month when he will get to try out a walker that has less support than his gait trainer, then transition eventually to two crutches and who knows when but it sure looks like he will eventually walk free. I cannot adequately describe how exciting that is to us.

I do have pictures and other things to post and will hopefully get myself in here to do it sometime this week. I've been spending every spare moment sewing, sewing, sewing, and John has nice new sheets, pillow cases, bed pads and pj pants to show for it, and still needs some long sleeve pj shirts, play clothes, clothes to go to town in and church clothes too, it's so very cool that everything from last year has high water legs and too short of arms.

Thanks so much for keeping us in your prayers and thoughts, these are amazing days and so much fun to watch.

Ah Vacation

Prior to leaving the guys needed a pre-vacation haircut, as you can tell John has had his and now it was going to be dad's turn, but we couldn't resist a picture before they traded places.

This was the very first time that we got to travel to North Carolina to visit with Mark's family and not have to tour the inside of any hospitals. John did great, he threw up one time on the way there and then had the time of his life. He's still asking about the cousins.



With two days of driving to do he had to find ways to entertain himself in the back seat. He was a cheerful traveler and learned lots of new things like how to throw things from the back seat to the front, how to reach everything in the back seat and move it, open it, pitch it, play with it or eat it. We read lots of books, watched some movies, enjoyed some music and finally made it to Papa's house.







John absolutely loved getting to play with his cousins. He is the second youngest of 12 cousins, the oldest one is 13 and the youngest is 2. He had so much fun racing around in circles with David and would stop in front of him so that David could ram him, boys are certainly boys. He did later come off the porch at a bad angle and take a header on the concrete but it didn't take long and he was back out racing in circles again.

Mark and I had a very enjoyable game of Risk with some of the older cousins, and the girls kicked butt, if we hadn't had to stop the game to go eat I'm sure that Savannah would have taken over the world.

We stayed most of the time with Mark's next older brother and his delightful wife and family. It was so nice to have so much time to visit and get to know them better, and John was so excited to be staying in a house with 6 cousins. He woke up most mornings at 5 or 6, signing to me 'wake-up cousins, wake-up cousins' as fast as his little fingers and hands could sign it. He learned to bump down all the stairs on his bottom and was so excited to play with the kids.

We are always impressed to be around so many kids and so many nice kids at that, it was a pleasure to be in the midst of family.

The reason for the timing of this visit was a close family wedding that Mark was preaching at. The wedding went well, the reception was wild, or rather John was wild at the reception as he seemed to think that he owned the dance floor. He was a bit timid getting out there to start with, but soon was running in circles and figure eights and laughing and smiling and making sure that there wasn't room out there on the dance floor for adults.



One last picture, I could have taken a million but I was too busy having fun too. This is the 3 youngest cousins, all boys, one with more fashion sense than the others, all having a good time.

So many things happened, and so much fun was had it's nearly impossible to list all of it, suffice it to say that we are looking forward to our next visit!

We're Home!

John had a great vacation, so did we, and I'll get pictures and news and everything here pretty soon, maybe even today :)