Emotional Week

This has been a crazy emotional week. Caroline had PAM this week and we tried a new regiment. The Omaha protocol is 1 day every 2 months. Our dr. here in OKC, is 3 days every 3 months, and in the end it's double the amount of PAM. After Web and I talked about it endlessly, prayed about it, plus me not sleeping at night thinking about it, we decided that was best for Caroline. We want to get her bones as strong as possible before we put her through surgery. We are hoping we can do one more treatment (3 days) before surgery but more on that later.

Luckily the IV took in 3 times, instead of 5 like last time. The nurses are so nice. They try so hard not to hurt to Caroline. This last time they finally decided to use a longer IV and it worked! Who knew our 15 month old would beed an IV fit for a young child? But her veins are long. Whatever works is my opinion. Caroline did well the 1st day, but definitely by the 3rd day she was done. There are only so many things you can entertain an 15 month old with while sitting in a hospital bed with an IV in her arm. Think about your child, friends child, could you see them sit in one spot for 4 hours, 3 days in a row? Exhausting. By the 3rd hour on the 3rd day I thought I might lose my mind. Poor Caroline, was trying to crawl off the bed! But like I said it is definitely worth it. You should see her right now. She is literally in a plank position trying to figure out how to stand! UGH. There is no stopping this child.

Now surgery. We are still waiting to hear back from the Dr. in Montreal. He has been in Haiti, and got back to the office late this week. My plan is to call him 1st thing Monday morning if I don't hear from him today. My gut is telling me what I think we should do, but I want to hear from him 1st. We definitely need to get the ball rolling because baby #2, will be here before we know it and I would like to have C's surgery done and done!

Speaking of baby #2. We received the test results from my blood work and all looked good. You know it's going to be ok, when the nurse calls over the dr. So yeah! We'll take that good news!

Also, Web and I are super excited to meet a new OI family! We are having them over for dinner Saturday night. There little one isn't here yet, he will be born next month. (the day before my birthday, ps.) We hope we can be some positive influence in the journey that lies ahead of them. It is far from easy, but with good friends, family, prayer, and a little bit of luck they will do just fine!

Love to all!

SURPRISE!

We're expecting baby #2!!!

Can you even believe it? We are due August 22nd, right in the middle of the hottest month of the year. But oh well! Web and I couldn't be more excited. We know that Caroline will be the best big sister EVER! As you can tell in the new picture, she is already! Her shirt says it all! HA!

Of course, nothing Web and I do is boring. I am considered AMA. AMA? Advanced Maternal Age. Apparently you turn 35 and you are considered AMA and you need to see a high risk doctor. Science is crazy. It goes back to turning 50 you need your colon checked. Lucky for me I really like my regular OB and we trust her 100%. Shout out to Dr. Strebel who reads this blog! We went to our 1st high risk appt on Monday and everything looked great. We go back in 6 weeks, then 4 weeks after that. The baby is measuring 12 weeks which is exactly how far along we are. Yeah! It's weird though. I don't feel nervous about this pregnancy at all. And no, I have no "feeling" of what we are having. I pray Healthy, Web prays healthy boy!

Also we found out we were pregnant on 12/21 and Caroline broke her femur on 12/30. I am already a blubbering fool when Caroline hurts herself, can you even imagine how I am when my hormones are out of whack?!? PLUS, I couldn't be in the x-ray room when she broke, so Web had to do it all. January has been a crazy roller coaster ride!

As for Caroline's surgery we have no clue. We are waiting to hear back from the doctor in Montreal. Once he looks at her x-rays we are hopeful he can give us his opinion on her hip. So it's a waiting game right now. We are still on the schedule in OKC to have surgery on April 4th. I pray we don't have to do surgery on her hip. And we can just do the rodding in her legs. But we need a 3rd opinion.

Life at the Browne house is as always fun, busy times!

Love to all!

A little normalcy

This week has been a weird blessing. Our Sweet Caroline got sick! She actually had a non OI related illness. We have never experienced this before, and as weird as it seems it felt good to be "normal". Caroline has never been sick. I have taken pride in knowing that our daughter has never had a cold, runny nose, cough, ear aches, stomach issues, nothing. But believe me she has had her fair share of doctors appointments! Poor girl has had more x-rays than the average man.

So last Monday I took Caroline to the day care at church so I could go to Mom's Morning. Have I ever mentioned Mom's Morning before? I really like it. It's a bunch of mom's with all age range of kids, we read a book, discuss, share stories, prayer requests, journaling, etc. Our last book was 5 Love Languages of Children. Caroline was too young to figure out her love language, but I got to practice on Web. Definitely "quality time". This semester we are reading Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood. It's a really good book. We are about to start the "Uh Oh" song at our house, but might need to change it to "Oh No" because Caroline says uh oh ALL THE TIME. Anyways, so Caroline was there for 90 minutes, then later that day she had her 15 month well being appointment. So somewhere in that time, she picked up the dreaded, but welcomed STOMACH FLU!

Oye veh, what a mess. Tuesday night, Caroline started a cough/cry. I just ignored it, because I know her pain cries vs. her non pain cries. Web gets up to check on her and he goes, "um you better come in here." She had thrown up all over the place, lunch and dinner. TMI, I know. We stayed up with her most of the night while she was sick. Of course, this had never happened to us before so we got out the computer, checked our doctors website and realized we had NO pedialyte, NO Gatorade, nothing bland at all. So the next morning, Web had to clear the drive and head to Wal Mart. Poor guy. He got stuck in the middle of the street and we had to call the Nichols Hills Fire Department to help him! Long story short, the stomach flu hit our whole house. Just like dominos. I think we are all on the up and up though!

Like I said, I know this is TMI. But it just felt good this week to be "normal". We didn't have to deal with a fracture, a splint, Motrin, rodding, hips. We just got to be a mom and dad with a sick kid. And it just felt good!