Leaving

The past week has been filled with leaving! Amelia was finally able to leave the hospital after 4 nights, and we were glad to come home. She is still on an inhaler several times a day and has some leftover congestion, but seems to be doing much better. The day after we came home from the hospital, the movers came to pack up our house. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. I am thankful that I did not have to pack up the house myself. But apparently, the person who came to estimate how much stuff we had to move underestimated. So it took the movers an extra day and filled much more of their truck than anticipated. Well, they told us they were going to deliver our stuff to the new house on Saturday (originally we were told Monday, then Sunday, and finally Saturday) So we made arrangements to be at the new house by Saturday. I don't know if you have ever traveled with young kinds, but a word to the wise: give yourself LOTS of extra time and get a DVD player (thanks mom & dad for allowing us to use yours!). What would have been a 10 hour drive for just Jason and me turned into over 12 hours with the kids... But we made it! When we were about halfway, we received a call that there was a glitch with the truck arrying our load. The driver was stopped at a weigh station and found to have a problem with his license. So our stuff was being held at the weigh station until a new driver could take over the load! The company was very apologetic and offered to pay the extra nights at a hotel (since we had no beds or anything to stay at the new house) and our meals for the extra couple of days. They promised to fly another driver out (#2 driver in their company) to take over and deliver our stuff to us by Monday. Needless to say, we are so excited to finally move in to our house tomorrow! The extra time has actually been a blessing, as we have had a couple of days to get some of the early work out of the way before the bulk of our stuff comes. We bought a shower curtain and liner for one of the bathrooms, had the locks changed, child-proofed the furnace room and attic access (a small door in an upstairs closet) and put away the few items we had to haul over (propane tanks for the bbq, cleaning chemicals, frozen food etc). Caleb keeps telling us that he loves his "new house" and begged us to stay there tonight instead of the hotel. I think we will all be glad to finally get settled and have some home-cooked meals. So far we really like the city. We have met a couple of our neighbors and they all seems very nice. The weather has been beautiful, in the high 60's today and sunny, but I guess we are supposed to have a few stormy days ahead. Hopefully the rain will hold off until after the movers are done tomorrow! Thanks to all our friends and family who have been praying for us through this time. We have really felt protected and watched over through all of this transition. It is not all easy, and the kids are definately feeling a lack of consistancy, but we can see God's hand in it all.

We knew Mia was feeling a lot better the last morning in the hospital, her smile was back!

Here's the truck that pulled up to move our stuff!
Headed out...
We stopped for Safeway Chinese, and these were our fortunes, a little crazy!

Caleb enjoying our new backyard.
One of the first touches we put on the house, a new shower curtain.

Hospital Adventures (the long version!)

The kids have had a cold. It all started with Caleb, who gave it to Natalie, who gave it to Amelia. That's how it goes with more than one kid, sickness just keeps getting passed along down the line. But for two-month old Amelia, sickness is not as easy to handle. I was keeping a really close eye on her and doing a lot of research on when to worry about a cold in kids. Usually, it is not too concerning if there is no fever (or even a fever for just a couple of days) and the kids are able to breath ok. Well, all was going ok other than a pretty stuffy nose, when on Wednesday night Amelia started to seem as if she was really struggling to breathe. I heard a slight wheeze for the first time from her, and she was panting. I kept counting her breaths per minute and it was 15 breaths higher than what Dr. Sears says warrants an immediate trip to the ER. So I called our family doctor and he echoed the advice, so off to the ER we went.
Apparently, babies who are struggling to breathe take priority in the ER because we got into the back with almost no wait time despite a very busy ER. The doctor listened to her and agreed she was not able to breath well. He ordered a chest x-ray and a breathing treatment that included a steroid to help ease her rapid, drawn breaths. He then ordered a blood sugar test, which came back really high. His diagnosis based on this was possible diabetes and he immediately called OHSU to see if we could get a bed there and started an IV. Upon a second blood sugar test (and another prick in the heel, poor girl) the blood sugar had lowered significantly and he called the on-call pediatrician. She said that the steroid treatment had probably caused her blood sugar to spike. They did yet another test and found she is positive for RSV ( a respiratory virus). The decision was made to admit her since she is so young and could have oxygen problems really easily with RSV. In the morning, the on-call pediatrician came by and let us know she would be keeping us one more night for observation, since most RSV babies tend to get worse before getting better and they weren't sure where on the curve she was. Sure enough that second night at about 1am she was not able to hold her oxygen levels high enough while sleeping and they started her on oxygen. Throughout today they tried a couple of times to take her off the oxygen, but had to put her back on as soon as she fell asleep. We have been told she will need to stay in the hospital until she is able to hold her oxygen levels up without assistance for an entire night. As for right now, she is still on the oxygen, so we may be looking at another night if things don't rapidly improve overnight.
Here are some pictures from our adventure so far.

The oxygen tubes she now sports on her nose.

Sleeping peacefully now that she can breath.
Her arm is all wrapped up to keep her from pulling out the IV.
The albuterol breathing treatments she gets every 3 hours around the clock.
This is the torture device used to give her a chest x-ray.

2 Months

Amelia is two months old now! We went to her doctor appointment this last week, and despite a bunch of shots, she did great. She weighed in at just over 12 pounds, which means she has gained almost 5 pounds since birth. She jumped from the 50 percentile to just over the 90 percentile. As for height, she is 22.5 inches long, having jumped from the 50 percentile to the 75 percentile. The doctor did find a small hip click in her left hip, so we will be going in tomorrow for an ultrasound to make sure she is not developing hip dysplasia.

I am really enjoying watching her little personality begin to shine. She is very smiley and happy. Daddy can even make her giggle when he tickles her. I think she will be the most ticklish of all our children. I can hardly pat her back to burp her without her squirming because it tickles. It is amazing to me that in only a couple of months I can hardly remember life without three children. Life is so rich with all three and we are very blessed!

Saying Good-bye and CQ's

Because we are moving on such a tight timeline, we do not have time to get together individually with many of our friends and family before the move. So we decided a good-bye barbecue sounded like a good way to see everyone. If you know Jason and me, we love to host at our house, and have had many large get-togethers over the past several years. Well, we had a wonderful time yesterday having so many of our friends and family over to celebrate our move. It was a time with much laughter, a few tears, and lots of love! We are realizing that we will really miss everyone here in Oregon (as if we didn't know that before!). Thanks to all who came!

On an exciting note, we may have a buyer for our home! I was starting to get discouraged that our home had been on the market for two weeks and didn't even have one showing. However, a realtor brought a family through yesterday morning and a few hours later they came back to take a second look and measure for their furniture...I think that's a good sign. We received a call last night that they will be meeting with their realtor today to put in an offer. What a blessing to have a prospect.

And now for a few Caleb Quotes. I have not been good about posting these, so here are some quotes (with stories!) from recently. Caleb loves to ask us if he can do things, and is very creative in his asking style. Lately he says to me, "you never mind if I eat this orange (or whatever else it is he wants to do)?"
Daddy loves to tuck Caleb in. Part of the night time routine is singing songs. One night Jason had to work late so I was tucking Caleb in. I always ask which song he wants to sing, and this night he said, "the monkey song!" Well, I don't know about you, but I don't know of any monkey songs! I tried hard to think of what the monkey song may be, but could not figure it out. So that night when Jason came home I asked him about the monkey song. He said, "oh yeah, that's Old MacDonald." What? Apparently Old Macdonald now has a monkey on his farm! Since then, Caleb's favorite song is Old MacDonald, and he often makes up new things for Old MacDonald's farm, like a mommy (who says "no, no here and yes, yes there"), a lion, and even some teeth (that go "chomp chomp").
Whenever Caleb wants to ask a question beginning with "who" he replaces the "who" with "whobody". So he'll say "whobody is at the door?" He made up a song that he loves to sing about whobody and it goes like this..."Whobody on the road? Whobody on the road? Whobody is it? It's....ooma!"

Once Upon A Sunny Day in March...

Today was such a beautiful day! I think the sunshine rubbed off on the kids, as they were in splendid moods. I think it helped that Caleb and Natalie were able to get out in the backyard and run around. Caleb stayed out all afternoon and pushed his trucks around in the dirt. He came in covered in dirt from head to toe! Such a little boy, I love it! Natalie came inside after a bit and played around with Amelia and me. Natalie is a little busy body these days, carrying things here and there, making little piles all over the house. Amelia has been growing so much, I can hardly believe she will be 8 weeks old tomorrow! She really started smiling a couple of weeks ago and can't seem to stop! Even in the middle of the night when she wakes up to eat, she gives me a bright smile after she's all done. What a joyful child she is. I took the oppoortunity of such a wonderful day to snap a few pictures of the kids playing. Here's our day in pictures: