Holy moly, where does the time go??
It still feels like yesterday that we were walking through the recovery process from Julia's frontal orbital advancement surgery, but it was 5 months ago! I see photos of her from before the surgery and I can hardly remember her little face and the shape it used to be, yet surgery seems to have barely come and gone; it's funny how the concept of time can be so skewed.
She has since become an expert and can stand up against anything. Couches, tables, cupboards, our legs. chairs, whatever is strong enough for her to pull up on. She's figuring out how our lever handles on the doors work....so one day soon she's going to be leaning on that door, become successful at pulling the lever, and be in for a rude awakening! But, you live and you learn, right?
Julia has also become an expert stair climber in the last month or so, and she's starting to get the balance and confidence to stand unassisted on her own, too! So it's only a matter of time before we have another walker in our midst. I'm not sure I'm prepared for it just yet (will I ever be??), but it's an amazing step in the direction we want our sweet little one to be going!
We have been enjoying a lot of wonderful weather here this Spring. We've been on many great walks to the beach and to grandma and grandpa's community garden plot; the girls adore being outside! Abby is definitely getting older and wants to do a lot more. She insisted that she pull Julia and the wagon, and so she did! She slept well that night, I'll tell ya that!
The girls are both getting to the age where they're interacting more with each other, and I can already tell I'm in for some trouble! I've caught Abby hoisting Julia up onto the couch and the two of them will sit together and giggle. The interaction between them makes my heart swell; I have no doubt that they will love and support each other as the years pass (once we get out of the phase of stealing each other's toys and the constant hitting and pushing).
We had a really fun Easter weekend! We had family visiting and we had a great time celebrating and having Easter festivities, including an egg hunt around our yard. The girls really enjoyed having their four boy cousins running around! It was busy and high energy, and exactly how Abby liked it, haha.
As the weather becomes nicer, we are spending more and more time outside. There is a definite drawback to Julia not crawling or walking, but scooting around on her bum. Her bum is constantly filthy! In the above photo you see Julia holding some sidewalk chalk. Abby and I had done some drawings with the chalk and they looked great, until little miss bum scooter just scooted her way right through the rainbow! The pollen has been really bad this year, too, which means that Julia's bottom is consistently covered in layers of both dirt and yellow pollen. We have a one-piece splash suit (pictured below) but it's a bit warm for her to be wearing in 20C+ weather, so her pants are just getting well loved instead.
With Abby being a bit older we're doing a lot of fun activities this spring. She requests daily that we have a picnic lunch outside, along with her requests of playing with playdough, blowing bubbles, eating chocolate, and playing soccer. Julia is still figuring out how to balance on their little picnic table, so she spends more time playing around than actually eating during our picnics. Plus, there are always planes and birds flying overhead, so lunch time is never a quick affair these days but it's memories made and I love being able to spend those moments with them.
Last fall, Chad and his dad built some raised garden boxes for planting veggies. So a couple weekends ago we got the majority of that planted, which is very exciting! Abby also had some excitement of her own as we planted a flower garden in this big, blue tub we found. Originally, we sprinkled seeds of different varieties in nice neat rows that I had made, but in true small child fashion I looked over 10 minutes later and she had the shovel and she was digging and mixing the dirt around. So, I have no idea what will come up and where.....but, it's her flower garden, so it's her rules, and will be all designed by her!
As you all may be wondering, here is my announcement that we do finally have another date for surgery for Julia. We've been waiting for three months now and have now been told that she's booked in for May 12th. So soon! This surgery will be on her right hand only and it will separate the middle fingers as well as fix up the web space of her thumb. Where the grafting was done in her thumb area there has been a lot of scar tissue formed. Some call it "web creep" and it hinders her range of motion. Her thumbs are already shorter than most, so being able to re-do that area and give her the best possible outcome is important.
I can't speak for Chad, but I'm feeling pretty different about this surgery compared to the last two. I don't know whether it's because her cranial surgery was such a major one that a few fingers seems no big deal, or what. But, I feel like we've "been there, done that" and we'll be home before we know it. I'm prepared for a shared room (instead of the glorious private room we had last time!) and a night of no sleep just like her first hand surgery, but we'll see. She bounced back so quickly last time that I'm just not too worried. I'm most concerned about the bandage changes that we have to do here at home and how that will go. We've done the bandaging before, but she's getting older now; her perception of pain and of uncomfortable situations is growing and changing. The innocence of a baby that didn't understand what was going on was rather nice!
So, May 12th, friends. That's the big day. Prayer will be much appreciated as we go on another medical adventure with this beautiful girl of ours. And prayer not only for Julia and her healing but also for Abby. She's a three year old with a lot of big emotions and not a lot of good ways of expressing them yet. Being the sibling that gets "left behind" is not easy and it's something that we struggle with knowing how to handle. Chad is able to take a couple days off from work, so there will be extra hands to help out which is awesome, but it's still a big transition for us all. We are choosing to trust in the future that has been laid out before us, and we know that it will be perfect. I'm so grateful for all of you that have journeyed alongside us thus far and for your support in the days and years to come. We have met new people and built relationships through the situations we find ourselves in, and we are learning to put our trust in the One who created us all. There is a plan far greater than the one we can see or even imagine and it's exciting to watch it unfold together with you all!
It still feels like yesterday that we were walking through the recovery process from Julia's frontal orbital advancement surgery, but it was 5 months ago! I see photos of her from before the surgery and I can hardly remember her little face and the shape it used to be, yet surgery seems to have barely come and gone; it's funny how the concept of time can be so skewed.
When I start looking back through photos, though, I realize how many things have happened in between then and now. Winter time and Christmas have come and gone. We had a few small sprinklings of snow and we took every opportunity to get outside. Abby was all about building snowmen this year (surprisingly, she hasn't even watched Frozen, so we can't blame it on that!), so we would take the 24 hours window of time we had before the snow melted and build a snowman.
With the start of 2016 came a very long string of doctor's appointments. All the specialists had told us, "we'll see you in the New Year," which meant a couple months full of travel and tests and discussions. We are very blessed to be living where we are, so when I say "travel" I mean we had to drive 30-45 minutes to an appointment. But it still felt like a lot for us as we visited the ophthalmologist, the physiotherapist (twice), the pediatrician, the neurosurgeon, the radiology department, and the plastic surgeon within a few weeks time.
Our trip to the plastic surgeon's office was booked to be a follow-up appointment for her cranial surgery, but everything was looking really good so it turned into an appointment to discuss her next surgery. The surgeon wanted to see x-rays of Julia's hands and so our one "quick" appointment (I put "quick" in quotations because we always have a minimum of an hour wait at the plastic surgeon's office) turned into a lot more. A lot of times I leave Abby at home with Grandma, but had decided that I would take her to this appointment. I mean, it was at a children's hospital - it's made for children. The waiting areas all have toys and movies playing and the staff are fantastic, so Abby came with us. But it was a decision that definitely gave me more than I had bargained for! We sat in the waiting room for over an hour, saw the plastic surgeon, and then were sent to another building to get x-rays of her hands done. The wait time for getting the x-rays was really minimal, which was nice, but then it was lunch time and we were getting squeezed in before the plastic surgeon's next set of patients right after lunch.
So we waited.
Thankfully, I had packed a little bit of a snack for myself now that I'm in the habit of eating a small meal/snack every couple of hours. So the girls and I shared what food I had, ate some Cheerios, I grabbed a coffee, and we waited.
The x-rays were really interesting!
This is her left hand. This hand was the most tightly fused
and the most "rose bud" of her two hands.
This is her right hand. You can see the metacarpals (the bones
that make up the palm of the hand) of her pinky and ring
fingers are fused.
Both hands look to be missing some little bones, which means we're preparing for the idea that she is likely going to have 4 fingers in total on each hand. We won't know for sure until Dr. Courtemanche is in surgery and can physically see what's going on in there, but the main point is that she gets proper function out of the fingers and hands that she has. So, we will pray and wait.
Julia is most definitely becoming a character.
She makes us laugh on a consistent basis!
We met with the ophthalmologist and were getting mentally prepared for getting Julia some glasses. We know that her eyesight leaves a lot to be desired - she has quite strong astigmatism and some far-sightedness. But Dr. Lyons had told us early on that he wanted to hold off on glasses as long as possible (eye sight at this age can change quite a bit, along with the fact that she would be supremely hard to fit with glasses due to the tiny bridge of her nose and her wide temples).
There seems to be a running theme with Julia, though. Every time we get prepared for an outcome, prayer is answered and our course changes. We have been told that Julia's eyesight has improved substantially since her cranial surgery! If you remember from one of my previous posts, the surgery involved moving the bone in the upper area of her eye socket. The ophthalmologist said that he wasn't expecting the surgery to have any baring on her eyesight, but it has. It must have allowed her eyes the room to change shape, which in turn has affected her sight! So her astigmatism isn't fully gone, but it has such marked improvement that we're not having to talk about glasses at the moment. We are still supposed to be patching her left eye for an hour a day though, as her right eye muscles are not as strong as her left. She also doesn't have perfect alignment of her eyes all the time - when she looks to the left, her right eye looks to the left but also looks up quite a bit. So we're hoping that the patching will help correct that to some extent, though it could very easily be caused by muscle site attachment more than muscle strength, but there has been no discussion about it at this point.
We had a follow-up appointment at the beginning of February with Julia's neurosurgeon and he was very pleased about her recovery from surgery. At this point we actually don't go back to see him until November or December (one year from surgery) because she's doing so well! We did get sent for one more head ultrasound, for good measure. Ultrasound can only be done when the soft spot in a child's head is still open (after that point they have to do a CT or MRI) and Julia's was closing quickly so we did one more for progress/tracking purposes.
She's always such a good sport, which makes all these appointments and tests such a pleasure to go through. She got a little hair gel (that nice, gooey, blue ultrasound gel) and was all checked out in no time. Everything looks great, with no major changes from previous ultrasounds, so everyone is happy!
Julia has been seeing a physiotherapist for a couple months now. She is lagging a bit in her gross motor functions - crawling, standing, walking, etc. - so it was time to get put into the physio program. She has since been progressing at an amazing pace!
She first started pulling herself up to stand at the baby gate. It was actually the perfect scenario for her. The way our stairs are set up, we weren't able to put the gate right at the very top, so the gate sat on the first step. She would sit on the top step and pull herself up to stand. This allowed her to build up some upper and lower body strength. She then slowly began trying to stand at the coffee table and the couch.
Physio is as much about playtime
as anything!
Julia has also become an expert stair climber in the last month or so, and she's starting to get the balance and confidence to stand unassisted on her own, too! So it's only a matter of time before we have another walker in our midst. I'm not sure I'm prepared for it just yet (will I ever be??), but it's an amazing step in the direction we want our sweet little one to be going!
Julia loves her puppies!
We have been enjoying a lot of wonderful weather here this Spring. We've been on many great walks to the beach and to grandma and grandpa's community garden plot; the girls adore being outside! Abby is definitely getting older and wants to do a lot more. She insisted that she pull Julia and the wagon, and so she did! She slept well that night, I'll tell ya that!
The girls are both getting to the age where they're interacting more with each other, and I can already tell I'm in for some trouble! I've caught Abby hoisting Julia up onto the couch and the two of them will sit together and giggle. The interaction between them makes my heart swell; I have no doubt that they will love and support each other as the years pass (once we get out of the phase of stealing each other's toys and the constant hitting and pushing).
We had a really fun Easter weekend! We had family visiting and we had a great time celebrating and having Easter festivities, including an egg hunt around our yard. The girls really enjoyed having their four boy cousins running around! It was busy and high energy, and exactly how Abby liked it, haha.
We headed out to the beach in Point Roberts and enjoyed the sunshine, some shell collecting, and seal watching. I love that the the girls have the opportunity to live and grow up at the beach! Between our yard and the beach, we have no reason to leave this place! Okay, that's not true.....friends and family are reason to leave for short trips - but it's a treat to come home!!
As the weather becomes nicer, we are spending more and more time outside. There is a definite drawback to Julia not crawling or walking, but scooting around on her bum. Her bum is constantly filthy! In the above photo you see Julia holding some sidewalk chalk. Abby and I had done some drawings with the chalk and they looked great, until little miss bum scooter just scooted her way right through the rainbow! The pollen has been really bad this year, too, which means that Julia's bottom is consistently covered in layers of both dirt and yellow pollen. We have a one-piece splash suit (pictured below) but it's a bit warm for her to be wearing in 20C+ weather, so her pants are just getting well loved instead.
Julia wasn't feeling well one day
so I got some sleepy snuggles like
the ones I used to get when she
was a tiny baby <3
With Abby being a bit older we're doing a lot of fun activities this spring. She requests daily that we have a picnic lunch outside, along with her requests of playing with playdough, blowing bubbles, eating chocolate, and playing soccer. Julia is still figuring out how to balance on their little picnic table, so she spends more time playing around than actually eating during our picnics. Plus, there are always planes and birds flying overhead, so lunch time is never a quick affair these days but it's memories made and I love being able to spend those moments with them.
Last fall, Chad and his dad built some raised garden boxes for planting veggies. So a couple weekends ago we got the majority of that planted, which is very exciting! Abby also had some excitement of her own as we planted a flower garden in this big, blue tub we found. Originally, we sprinkled seeds of different varieties in nice neat rows that I had made, but in true small child fashion I looked over 10 minutes later and she had the shovel and she was digging and mixing the dirt around. So, I have no idea what will come up and where.....but, it's her flower garden, so it's her rules, and will be all designed by her!
So that about covers the major highlights of the past 5 or so months. Every day feels so similar to every other day, yet when I look back it's easy to see the progress and changes that are happening. The girls are growing and maturing and teaching me new things every day!
So, May 12th, friends. That's the big day. Prayer will be much appreciated as we go on another medical adventure with this beautiful girl of ours. And prayer not only for Julia and her healing but also for Abby. She's a three year old with a lot of big emotions and not a lot of good ways of expressing them yet. Being the sibling that gets "left behind" is not easy and it's something that we struggle with knowing how to handle. Chad is able to take a couple days off from work, so there will be extra hands to help out which is awesome, but it's still a big transition for us all. We are choosing to trust in the future that has been laid out before us, and we know that it will be perfect. I'm so grateful for all of you that have journeyed alongside us thus far and for your support in the days and years to come. We have met new people and built relationships through the situations we find ourselves in, and we are learning to put our trust in the One who created us all. There is a plan far greater than the one we can see or even imagine and it's exciting to watch it unfold together with you all!
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