Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all our friends and family! We hope 2011 brings you a lot of happiness, health, and peace.

Things here are going well. Evelyn is doing amazing and gaining weight steadily. She's now on 5 weeks of her Erythromycin and still responding! They said after 3-4 weeks the effects wear off and then you need to take a month off. We haven't had to do that yet and I'm thankful. I think though after this week I will do a voluntary break just to see what happens. We still haven't tried the Reglan which makes me very happy! I really want to avoid that.

She's tolerating full feedings again which is great. No complaints of chest pain, no vomiting etc. However, constipation is still a major issue. That had never really come back after this last episode. Thankfully we found a good treatment. The Chiropractor! That's the only thing that is helping her with the constipation. She can not go for 2 weeks, we bring her in, and she goes 2 hours later. So she's been going twice a week for a few weeks now. The chiro was hoping to wean her off visits to get her body used to it but like everything else, it's not that easy lol. Her body just isn't "remembering" and she needs the adjustments to keep things going. For now we will keep doing it. I'm just thankful something is working!

Her next appointment is still 2+ weeks away and I don't know what to expect. I don't know if we'll end up with the GJ tube or not. We shall see. We want it but at the same time what we are doing is working. But how long that will last we don't know and we don't want to get stuck after the fact

We are still hoping to attend the tube feeding camp in KY in April. I'm not sure if they found 30 families yet but we are crossing our fingers. I think it will be an amazing experience! We would need childcare for Joey for that weekend as we wouldn't be bringing him, so if anyone wants a super cute cuddly adorable baby boy for 3 days let us know! :) It's the weekend of April 8th.

Work is going good. Not super busy and I've been sent home early a lot of shifts. But I'm employed and cannot complain. There are many that can't say that. Patrick's job is a bit more demanding as they are so short staffed firefighters are being ordered to stay after their shifts almost daily. It always tends to happen on days I need to go to work. So we are just trying to get through this time and hope it doesn't happen on any extremely important days

Christmas was wonderful. The girls really understood it this year and it was so fun to see. I think I was more excited on Christmas morning than they were! Patrick worked Christmas Day, so we did our Christmas morning on Christmas Eve. The night before the girls left a note for Santa, left cookies and carrots, and left out their mangers of hay they had collected during Advent. Santa came, ate some cookies, Rudolph ate some carrots, they each got a little baby Jesus in their manger and Santa wrote back.

They had fun opening gifts. My goal was to not get any presents that require batteries or make noise and I did pretty darn good! Joey was kind of overwhelmed and still hasn't really played with anything he got. Oh well!

Then we went to my parents and opened gifts. After that we headed to church but the church was too full so we were sent away. We had to quickly find another church which was standing room only. That was interesting since the kids hadn't napped, were hungry, and standing for an hour and a half was hard. They did very good though. Then we headed to the Chenery's and had dinner and more gifts. The kids were wiped out by bedtime. Christmas day they just stayed home and enjoyed playing with all their new stuff.

Christmas break we didn't do much as one of us worked most days but we did take the kids shopping and swimming and things like that. Evelyn is more than ready to go back to school. She was playing school after dinner tonight :)

Sophia can't wait to see her friends again Monday. And I think Joey is looking forward to a quiet house again! I am also looking forward to getting back into the swing of things and getting our routine back.

The girls are looking forward to starting swimming lessons next week. I also have to take a class this semester which should be interesting. I haven't taken any classes in years! It's a class to raise my level of EMT from EMT basic to EMT intermediate. We can start IV's and give certain drugs. However, as an RN I perform those tasks every time I work so originally they said I didn't need to take the class. With two weeks notice they changed their mind and now I have to. Trying to wrangle up (and afford!) childcare has proved to be interesting. Thankfully we have a wonderful and reliable sitter Kari, who has helped us out tremendously. Patrick luckily doesn't need to take the class as he will be going to paramedic school in fall.

So that's us up to date. We are just praying for lots of health, growth, and some good memories this new year. 2010 was a difficult stressful year with a lot of chaos and sadness. I'm hoping that 2011 will bring us many new memories. I look forward to what the next year means for my kids. By this time next year I'll have a 6 1/2 year old, an almost 5 year old, and a 2 year old! EEK!

Happy New Year to all of you!