A Mother's Love...

With tomorrow being mother's day and then soon all three of our adopted children's birthdays, I think about each of their mothers.  I am grateful to them for choosing to have these babies and giving them the opportunity to live.  My heart breaks for them and the choice they had to make and the heartache they must feel as the birthdays near.  I cannot imagine the "weight" they carry.


My prayer for these mothers: 
I pray for them to have peace, that they would know deep down in their soul that their children are cared for and loved.  I pray for them to have strength because they did what they knew they had to do for these children to have a good life.  I pray for them to have hope, that they would come to know Christ and feel his presence among them.  My heavenly Father, I pray your hand upon them as I pray these things for them - Amen!


I dedicate this poem to Angel's, Tegan's and Corban's birth mothers.  I made a few changes (original words are in parenthesis), to read as if I were reading it to our children: 

Your (My) Birth Mom

© Emily E. Adkisson

Loving and gracious the
Women I've never met.
She made a difficult decision and
She will debate that decision for the
Rest of her life.
It was something she knew she had to do
She did it with
A Mothers Love.

She thinks about you (me) everyday
Every birthday, Every Mothers Day
Hurt will always be there.
You (I) would not be the person
You are (I am) today without
A Mothers Love.

I can never thank her enough
For all the pain
She must go through
To give you (me) a wonderful life
She had to show the biggest amount of
A Mothers Love.

Source: My Birth Mom, A Mother's Love, Adoption Poem http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/my-birth-mom-a-mothers-love#ixzz1ugZzTxue 
www.FamilyFriendPoems.com 

7 Weeks post Grafts

I know I'm a little slow on the blog, my intentions are good but life with 6 kids keeps me going and easily distracted.

The boys have healed well.  I removed all of Tegan's scalp stitches on my own - impressively he sat pretty well for it.  Thankfully it didn't take long to do.

Corban's on the other hand were a different story.  At two weeks out, which is how long they wanted us to wait, many of his stitches were starting to be embedded in the skin. Thankfully a retired nurse from our church offered to assist in removing them.  Good thing because it was not an easy task and took about an hour to get them all out with his squirming and all.  She had brought along some homemade chocolate chip cookies, Corban didn't want anything to do with them.  He was just ready to be left alone.

As of today, we are still wrapping Corban in an ace wrap. A nice chunk of the graft (about 3" long and 1 inch wide") died on the lower left side and supposedly the compression of the wrap along with the cortisone we've been putting on it, for the past 3 weeks, will help it heal faster.  I can finally say that in the past week, we have finally seen improvement.

Tegan has healed really well, thankfully no issues with him.  We had plenty of that before this last surgery.

Here is what Corban's incisions looked like April 1st, you can see on his left side (the right picture) the start of a hole in the corner of the flap.

Here is what the incisions looked like 8 days after the above photos:

Here is what it looks like as of  earlier this week :

                            

I hope this will be the last week we have to wrap him with it warming up. He can get quite hot with all that extra cloth on him.

We have set dates for their next set of expanders, that will happen on September 28th.  Then they will be removed  on December 21st. We do know that Tegan will not get an expander placed in his next this next time, Dr B wants to wait till next year to try the neck again.  Wants to give it plenty of healing time.  I'm not a huge fan that he has to sport then not so pretty scar for that long but I know doc knows what he's doing.  

I know many will think we are crazy doing it so close to the holiday but we don't want them missing too much preschool due to the multiple 2 week recoveries so we are utilizing Christmas break and I'll have extra hands to help entertain them.