Since there is so much to catch up on in my "absence"...
I guess I will just start by saying
"I'M BACK!"
I apologize for disappearing for the past several months, but life just got to be a bit too much to handle, and I really needed to focus on myself, and on my family for a while. I am ready to start typing away again and sharing in on life and it's craziness!
For starters, March - June, Clint and I helped build our brand new home with Habitat for Humanity!!! We are so thankful and feel so incredibly blessed that we were able to have the opportunity to learn and grow so much throughout this experience. We put in over 900 sweat equity hours during the course of our Habitat journey! It was 100% worth every second of it all, as we finally have a place that we can call home!! We moved in over the Fourth of July and have loved every minute of it since!!
June started out with a lot of challenges for us. Not only were we finishing the build of our new home, but I was ending employment because of several reasons (including my own health challenges) and moving back into my role as a full time stay at home Mommy and Clint was starting new employment full time on top of his already part time job, and Taleigha was set for surgery, needing her tubes replaced (after having more ear infections than I could keep track of), Adenoidectomy and Tonsillectomy. June 4 was Taleigha's surgery.
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| My Big Girl waiting to be taken back for surgery! |
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| Taleigha, Mommy, and Daddy before her surgery! |
Her surgery itself went well, with no complications, however, coming out of the anesthesia proved to be quite difficult. She had to be admitted overnight due to the tonsillectomy, which made us feel more comfortable anyway, so we welcomed that stay (although hospital overnights are never fun!). In the 24 hours after her surgery we were not able to get her to take anything in orally, but they sent us home anyway. I was not happy about that! Clint started his new job on June 6, starting his 14 hour days, 5 days a week. I was officially left to handle a 3 year old child recovering from major surgery and a rambunctious almost 2 year old all by myself. A week went by and Taleigha would hardly eat or drink anything! I tried everything I could possibly think of trying; pudding, yogurt, applesauce, ice cream, popsicles, mashed potatoes, water, juice, milk, etc! She didn't want anything. It had gotten to the point over that week that I was syringing liquids into her mouth as much as I could, but she even started to refuse that. Our days and nights were filled with a constant achy cry. She was miserable. Her eyes began to look sunken in and her body was becoming extremely weak. I brought her to her doctor and they immediately admitted her to Children's Hospital for dehydration. She stayed one night and had an IV for fluids and they sent her back home... even though she still wasn't taking much fluids in on her own.
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| Wishing I could take all of her pain away! |
Another full week passed, and we finally felt like we were making some progress. She seemed like she started feeling better, and she was finally eating and drinking a little bit. Exactly two weeks after her surgery, we took her out for her 3rd birthday and to celebrate Father's Day. She had a pretty good day considering all she had been through. But when we got home, things suddenly took a turn for the worse. She started gushing blood from her nose and her mouth. Clint and I scooped both of the girls up and drove straight to the hospital (which was only about a mile away from our house). We rushed her in and got her checked in and, much to our surprise, they asked us to take a seat and wait to be called back. The ER was extremely busy, but we couldn't understand why they didn't think that she was a priority to get back. After waiting almost an HOUR in the waiting room, with her bleeding and struggling to breathe because of the large amounts of blood that she was swallowing, we were brought back to see a doctor. I will spare most of the completely ridiculous details of events that took place with the doctor, and go straight to the fact that she ended up being transported by ambulance to a different hospital where an on call ENT took one look at her and rushed her in for emergency surgery to stop the bleeding. During the surgery, they realized that she indeed had swallowed such a large amount of blood, that it was necessary to pump her stomach. Our poor girl went through more than she should have had to face. She was in extremely rough condition, and at one point, I had turned to Clint, while holding my little girl, and couldn't help but feel like I was looking at a dying child, difficult as that may be to even say something like that, it was my honest feeling. It was the scariest moment of my life. I just wanted to trade places with her. I wanted her to be okay.
(I could write an entire book on the malpractice that took place that night, and how incredibly disgusted that we were with everything, but emotions tend to run a little high when talking about it, so I will just leave things at that!) Overall, the recovery took a month and a half before she was even starting to turn around!! It took much longer than that before we finally started to see our little angel being herself again. She is a fighter, and she is so strong, and she pushed through every single difficult day that she faced. She truly is... a little miracle!
She is doing extremely well now, and we are now just weeks away from her starting Early Childhood Classes in September! I can't believe my BABY is going to be hopping on a bus soon and heading to school!!!
Taelyn has grown up so much in the past several months, I don't even know where to begin with her! She is definitely 'Mommy's little helper' around the house! She LOVES to help, in any way that she can, and is always looking out for her big sister! She is talking away and is literally a little sponge, quickly absorbing everything! She has a personality as big as the world and is a complete joy to be around!! She is... special! There is just no other way to explain it! She brings something into my life that is so unexplainable. I am so lucky that she is my daughter!
It is absolutely amazing to me how close that the girls are! They truly are the best of friends (fighting and all)! They are always watching out for each other, and offer up hugs and kisses to each other often! I couldn't be more blessed!
I can't wait to be able to fill you all in more, but for now, I think I will end on this note! I very much look forward to being able to 'type away' a little more often!
God Bless!
~Brittany
