Refining

It's almost April and I'm wondering where the time has gone. A quarter of this year is nearly gone! Two small children keep a girl occupied, I guess!

I'm feeling very tired right now. I've been doing a lot of traveling these past three months. I've already been back to San Diego 4 times since January and I've lost count of the number of trips to Portland we've been making. That's been averaging at least once a week. Portland is an awesome city and I wish we were going up there for sightseeing. Unfortunately, most of our time has been spent at Children's Hospital. Next week Jack is going to have a fairly invasive surgery to (hopefully) prevent him from having the degree of reflux he does and the laryngospasms. At the same time, they will put a feeding tube in his stomach, with a "button" on the outside of his tummy. The feeding tube will be primarily so that we can "vent" his stomach or empty it if he is nauseous.

At the same time, Charlie has been showing many of the same symptoms and so he's been undergoing a few tests, as well. What we know from the initial tests is that he, too, is aspirating when he nurses or drinks from a bottle so I had to give up breastfeeding and go to exclusively pumping so we can thicken the milk to prevent it from going into his lungs. Funny--I was so reluctant about breastfeeding after my experience with Jack, I was thoroughly planning to pump like I did for Jack. I never dreamed how much I would wind up enjoying the experience of nursing. I have been so sad about giving it up but after seeing how much less pain Charlie is in when drinking thickened milk, I can see it's the right way to go. He has a couple more tests in April and then we'll go from there as to whether he will also need this surgery.

This has been a hard decision to come to. Every doctor he has seen, including some second opinions, are all in agreement that he needs this surgery. I'm still struggling with reconciling what appears to by my perfect healthy baby with what all these tests tell us is really going on inside of him. I'm so scared that we are making a decision that is going to make things worse than better. This is what I think is one of the hardest things about being a parent: being the judge and jury for your child's health. I feel very unqualified sometimes (well, most of the time!) to do this. So, nearly two years to the day Jack finally got released from the NICU, we are heading back to the hospital. I'm trusting God that this is the right path, the right decision, and that this experience is refining our faith.

On another note, I've written before about our struggle to find a church up here. We have been looking for the right church with the right community so we can meet some people up here, ideally some other young families. We did find a Catholic church that we like and have gone a several times, with the challenge that Jack lasts about 10 minutes in the nursery before we are called to come get him. He's not so good about sitting through Mass with us, though, so church has been a bit of a challenge. (How do you other mommies deal with 2 year olds and church????) So, although St. Mary's has been good, we still haven't found that community we were looking for. We made the decision to widen our horizons a bit so last week we went to a community church in our area. Wow--it was an amazing experience. This was the most family-centered, welcoming church I've ever been to. Jack still didn't last long in the nursery (I think we are going to have to keep working on this) but after the service, we were feeding Charlie in the common area outside of the santuary and at least 11 different people introduced themselves to us, realizing we were "newbies." We were invited out to lunch, to join a small group, and to join a mom's group. Everyone was so incredibly sincere and friendly that we immediately felt right at home. The service was different for us--defintitely more "casual" than a Catholic service but the sermon was good and the music was amazing. The community was just what we have been searching for. So, I think we are going to split our time. My Catholic faith is still very important to me, as is raising my kids in the Faith, so we plan to do Saturday night Masses and Sunday mornings at this new church. I'm excited to see where this brings us.

That's about it, please keep Jack in your prayers next week (and this nervous mama too!).