Merry Christmas!

We've been having such a fun Christmas season with the kids.  We've been trying to be very purposeful in the activities we choose to do and our first priority is spending time with family.  We've done a lot of spending time with family and that has been great.  The kids are eating up this precious time with Uncle Tim, Aunt Rachel and cousin Joy.  Each day they want to know when is the next time they will get to play together.  My brothers are in town also and so it's been so nice to see Uncle Jarrett, Aunt Dorothy, cousins Sam and Seth, Uncle Jon, Aunt Carmen and cousins Bradley, Andrew, Jordan and Jon-Luke.  Mia has attached herself to Bradley and wants to be just like him, sit by him at the dinner table and do as much as she can with him.  Thankfully he loves kids and does a super job interacting with Mia.  Calvin and Jon-Luke are two peas in a pod and love doing everything together.  Asher fits in well too and everyone is just having so much fun together.  It's a very sweet time and we are just savoring every minute.

We added in a third medicine to Mia's meds a few weeks ago and it appears to be what she needed to stop her seizures.  She's been seizure free for a week and we are so thankful.  It's been almost a year since her seizures started and she has rarely gone more than a day without a seizure, so to be without for a week...the feeling of immense gratitude is indescribable.  I tear up just writing about it because it's been such a long year for her and for us.  God couldn't have picked a better Christmas present for us than this.  Praise God!!!  And yet, what we've gone through has been a difficult year, nothing can compare to the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross for us.  And while we've been blessed with a seizure free Christmas, the ultimate gift is Jesus himself.  For that, we are eternally grateful and it gives us the hope and ability to keep running the race for Him.

So as always, thank you for praying for Mia.  We are so grateful and we wish you and your family, a very Merry Christmas from our house to yours!

And Now It's December!

Time flies when...well, it just flies these days.  I blink and it feels like it's a month later.  We continue to plug along.  We've been spending quite a bit of time with family and doing fun, festive things this Christmas season.  We haven't been swept away with too much activity, it seems to be just the right pace for our family. 

We decorated our Christmas tree and that was so much fun for the kids.  This is the first year I haven't had to barricade the tree off in some sort of way to keep little hands from the ornaments.  Asher has done a really good job of not touching too many things.  He has broken a few ornaments already, but I figure that is par for the course for an almost, but not quite 3 year old. 

We have been doing some different advent calendars, one of which is the Lego advent calendar.  It's been fun and exciting to find what's hiding behind each door.  Calvin did peek behind door #24 and it is the Santa Clause.  I told him, that's no fun to peek, you have to wait for the day to come to look and see.  He then proceeded to tell me it is fun to peek and he's still excited knowing that Santa is behind door #24.  I think he gets that from me.  I like knowing the end of things (books and movies) before reading/seeing it, knowing how it ends removes the anxiety and it is still exciting for me to read the book or watch the movie. 

We also have been doing a daily Jesse Tree advent thingy madingy.  I saw someone else do it and decided to copy theirs.  Each day they hang up an ornament that corresponds to a bible devotional.  It tracks the lineage of Jesus, hence the name Jesse Tree (out of the root of Jesse...).  The kids have been enjoying that too. 

Mia is still having seizures.  Please continue to pray for her and us as we navigate our next decisions.  We added in a third medicine today for her and should know in a few weeks if that is working or not.  We pray it will!  Thank you for always praying for her!

Uh, where have I been?

Well, someone how or another I have almost missed November.  I did have well meaning thoughts to actually post an update on here awhile ago, but we got busy again. 

This week, I've been to LA twice already and am happy to not go back until next year for any doctor appointments for Mia.  We saw her orthopaedist on Tuesday.  Her OT is concerned because her left foot has been turning out more recently and she seems to be stretching her knee muscle/ligament the wrong way.  Note to parents out there:  Don't let your kids sit with their legs in the shape of a W.  That's when their knees are in front, they are sitting on their bottom and their legs are back by their hips.  Criss Cross Applesauce is the way they should always sit.  We'd been lenient with her and hopefully it hasn't caused too much damage.  Now we are very strict again.  Bottom line is that our first step in addressing the issue is to get an insert for her shoe and hopefully that positions her foot in the correct alignment.  After that, there are some casting options and surgery options, but we'd rather not go that route. 

After that we had a visit to her cardiologist on Wednesday.  It was time for her annual echo of her heart.  She's been doing this for awhile and there hasn't been any change, really since when the surgery was done at a little over one year of age.  In fact, 7 Thanksgivings ago to be exact.  He basically told us that her heart looks just like a heart that was born normal.  He doesn't anticipate any changes ever, but they still like to monitor them, so he felt like stretching her appointment out to every 2 years was good now.  I imagine as she gets older and everything stays stable, that appointment will get stretched out even further.  Praise God for gifting people with the ability to take a heart that can not function on its own and surgically help it to function as though it was born without any problems!  We rely so much on science, but ultimately, we have to remember that God is the one who has gifted people with the ability to learn and perform these operations.  Ultimately, God gets all the glory!  Amen. 

Today we are braving the theater with all of our kids.  Calvin has been the only one to go to a movie in the theater so far and he didn't make it through the whole Lego movie before being scared and leaving.  Today we are going to attempt the Peanuts movie.  There shouldn't be anything scary and I think they will like it.  As a special treat, we get to go with their cousin Joy!  The kids just love spending time together and we are grateful to have them here, even though the circumstances getting them here wasn't their first choice. 

The kids are getting excited about Thanksgiving.  It should be a fun week for them next week. 

Mia is still having seizures daily.  Please be in prayer for us about wisdom for the next step.  And please continue to pray that God would miraculously stop them. 

Happy Halloween!

We have been having a great October.  The kids and I have done some fun halloween crafts and we've attended some fun events.  We've hit the pumpkin patch and a harvest festival at a local church.  The kids have been loving the extra activities.  Last night we carved our pumpkin and tonight we watched Curious George:  A Halloween Boo Fest.  They can't wait until tomorrow. 

We checked out a book from our church library, The Pumpkin Gospel.  It relates carving a pumpkin to our salvation with Jesus.  Our sin is the ooey gooey stuff inside that needs to get scooped out.  Then God's light can shine out through your pumpkin.  We read it a few weeks ago and the kids really enjoyed it...when we were carving our pumpkin they got excited and said, "this is just like the pumpkin gospel!"  I love when they make connections like that. 

Mia is still having her seizures.  We've increased her medicine again and we have one more increase that we can do.  If not, her neurologist wants to add in a third medicine.  We hope and pray that this is enough and her seizures stop.  Thank you for always praying with us!

Here are some pics of the kiddos. 

And the cake...

This year Mia wanted a Komodo cake.  Komodo is a character from the cartoon Animal Mechanicals.  He is a mechanical dragon.  She loves that show because there are 5 characters and she has named each one of her family members after them.  She, of course, is Komodo.  I am Unicorn, Daddy is Rex, Calvin is Sasquatch and Asher is Mouse. 

Usually when one of them gets an idea for a cake, I immediately pinterest it to get creative "easy" ideas.  I am not the Cake Boss.  But, I do have a lot of fun creating the best possible cake I can do for them.  And they are super easy to please, so that makes my job easier.  When I searched for Komodo cakes, there were none.  That made my job a bit more difficult.  Here are the characters from the show, Komodo is the red one:

Now, there was no way that I was going to make a full size Komodo.  After thinking about it for awhile, I thought that maybe I could recreate the head of Komodo.  What sealed the deal was when I was shopping at Hobby Lobby and I found a mold to make eyeglasses from those candy melts, I immediately thought that would be perfect on this cake.  And I made a bunch more for the kids for their party favors.  Here is what our cake looked like:

The kids had fun, we played lots of pumpkin games...pumpkin bowling, pumpkin races...and they got to make candy apples.  It was a fun party!