Tea Party

For Christmas, my mom gave the girls a treat and took them to a tea room. We all got dressed up and enjoyed an afternoon tea. It was a delight! 

Recovery of Coarctation Repair Surgery

Day One

They told us when she went in that we would probably be in the ICU for about 4-7 days depending on how things went.  This picture to the left was her after the surgery.  She was pretty much out of it and on pain meds the first day.  The epidural cracked during surgery so they had to take that out and give it to her based on her pain.  The first night was a tough one as she kept waking up and feeling like she was going to throw up.

This is a picture of her the first night. This was taken right after one of her episodes.  The nurses were great in helping my husband and I.  Thankfully my husbands mom came and stayed with the other three kids at home the first night.  So we could both be there for her. 

Day Two

Wednesday was the surgery, Thursday was the day the therapy dogs came.  As you can tell she is still kind of out of it, but before she went in she was hoping to see the therapy dogs.  So, with the nurses help we got her in a chair for when they came around.  My sister, Kristyn, flew in from Texas (with the help of one of my neighbors, which I will be forever grateful).  She is a nurse, so it was great having her here.  Since she was able to get out of the bed, with help, they decided that we should try and get her to go to the bathroom on her own.  With the chest tube, this became quite difficult, but needed to get her out of there.   When the therapy dogs came around she was "excited", and by excited I mean woke up, to see them.  It was great because we needed her to start moving her arm, because she didn't want to and it was becoming stiff.  So we made her reach out to touch the dog. As you can tell in this picture she really just wants to use her good arm.  She was not too happy about trying the other.  I understand, but this program was a great help!  This was part of the Child Life program, which I will blog about another time and put the link on here.  It is a great program and without it I think it would take children longer to recover. 
 Kiley enjoyed having the siblings with her during her stay.  Later on that day she started sitting up more and watched a movie with her brother and sisters.  Here is a picture of them in the room enjoying time together.

 It was nice, but Kiley got use to watching a lot of TV.  It was helpful, because when she was watching the focus was on the TV, not on the pain.  So, night times were really hard.  Looking back I might of just turned on the TV to  help with the pain, but she did get some good sleep in between the pain and nausea.  But, that usually came at night when all had settled down. 




Day Three

They wanted to get her up and walking more, she had really only gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom, which like I said was hard enough because of the chest tube.  It was stuck in her chest through her side and if she moved when they took her to the bathroom it was tons of pain.  So on day three all the drainage had come out and they took the chest tube out.  After they did that she was a new woman!  They got her up and decided to go for a walk with her siblings to the activities room.  There was also an ice cream social for all the kids and musicians playing for them.  It was an incentive to get a move on.  So here is a picture of our nurse, Heather, walking Kiley down the hall.  I will post more pictures of the actual events in my Child Life post.   She walked all the way down to the play room and they had the Wii set up.  This was great because she and her twin played the drums on the Rock Band game and we made her try and use her hurt arm, but of course she mostly used her good one, but it was good to try it out.  It got a smile on her face. 

 That night she slept a lot better and we were told that she would go home the next day!  We had no idea she would recover so quickly.  We attribute it to all the prayers that people were praying for her all over the world, as well as, the determination herself to GET OUT OF THERE!  Our God was faithful in watching out for her, our verse for this whole experience is Ephesians 3:20-21 "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen."




Day Four-Going Home

She enjoyed one last arts and crafts project from Child Life and then we got ready to go home. 

Sundowner 1m and 5k

So our annual run with my nephew, Lukus, was a ton of fun this year.  Due to Kiley's surgery she had to watch, but we signed her up anyway so she could at least wear the shirt.  Although I am praising God that nothing bad happened to her last year.  She had such a hard time, little did we know that it was due to her heart problems.  She completed the mile though, she is a tough cookie!  Here the runners are getting ready for the race.  It was so hot out in the 90s. 

Dad and son enjoying getting ready together.

As you can tell the girls were very excited...really they were! 

John and Lukus ready to hit the trail.

Kiley watching for her siblings.

The cousins watching for Jason to run across the finish line for the 5K.

There is my handsome man...in the blue shirt.  (Sorry, the other pictures he was behind this guy)

We are so excited and can't wait for next year!  Kiley is hoping to run this one and beat her sisters. Stay tuned...

Repair of the Coarctation of the Aorta

THE DAY OF THE SURGERY

Kiley was packed and ready to go.  She had such a good attitude:

"If I can run again, then they can do whatever they want."

Aunt Kristyn flew into be with her.

Grandma drove to be with her.

                        GG and Papa came up to be with her.

 They gave her an award for BRAVERY!  Because she was definitely brave!

They brought us back into the surgical waiting area and we waited and waited and waited.  They brought books for us to read to her and we played with our camera taking funny pictures.        Then the anesthesiologist came in and explained things to us and the plan for the surgery. Then they took her back.  My mom has this beautiful picture of Kiley and nurse Natalie walking back hand-in-hand to the operating room and her talking the whole way.  We were so proud of her.  We know it was all the prayers of everyone all of the country, ones we didn't even know, that were lifting her up at that moment.  And then we waited in a family waiting area. It was set up just for us.  It was nice not having to wait with everyone else. We played Speed Scrabble to pass the time.  Then Nurse Natalie came and gave us an update halfway through the surgery that everything was ok.  Within two hours all was done and she was headed to post op.  We went up and were waiting and waiting to see her.  The hard part was they called my husband and I back and then a doctor came out and told us that coarctation was more closed that they had anticipated, but that they were able to do a good repair and she was doing good.  The hard thing was that the epidurial cracked during surgery and they had to take it out, but we didn't know that at first and it took them FOREVER to come back and get us and we could see all the nurses coming and going from  her room and so we thought something bad was happening, but they were just trying to get the tube out of her back.  This is our dear daughter after her surgery.  She did such a good job and we thank God abundantly for the sucess of it.  I will have to post later about her recovery, which was amazing in itself.  Praise God!

Shone's Complex

Our daughter went in for her 8th annual checkup,in April, and as with the previous year had some high blood pressure. The doctor the year before did not think much of it because there was a TON of different situations our family was going through at the time.

So, they checked the pulse in her femurs and could barely feel one. Therefore he sent us to a pediatric cardiologist. At that appointment they could not find a pulse in her legs and decided to do an echocardiogram. This revealed multiple problems with her heart:
Shone's Complex:
1) Parachute mitral valve (mitral valve stenosis)
2) Ventricular septal defect (hole in heart)
3) Bicuspid aortic valve/aortic insufficiency aortic valve
4) coarctation of Aorta
5) small left ventrical

Shone's Complex:

1) Parachute mitral valve (mitral valve stenosis)

2) Ventricular septal defect (hole in heart)

3) Bicuspid aortic valve/aortic insufficiency aortic valve

4) coarctation of Aorta

5) small left ventrical

From there we had to have MRI/MRA of heart and brain to make sure the details of what was going on.  At first they had told us that she needed Open Heart Surgery (OHS) and then after the MRI they decided to go a different route.  They decided to fix her Coarctation of the Aorta because it was almost completely closed, getting no blood to her legs and then see if the pressure change fixed the other problems. 

We decided to go with that.  The month of June was difficult considering if she got her heart rate up too much she could just drop dead (trying not to be too graphic, but honest).  We relied on the fact that our God had kept her safe these eight years without us even knowing she had the problem, He could keep her safe this rest of the way.

On July 6th, after gentic testing which ruled out Turner's Syndrome and Noonan's Syndrome, she went in to have her surgery.  She was such a trooper.  We went to two different doctors one at Lutheran General, Dr. Ilbawi and met with a team at Children's Memorial, Dr. Backer.  After lots and lots of prayer (by many people) we decided to go with Dr. Ilbawi, and could never be happier. 

Side note: Dr. Ilbawi is one of the most focused and humble doctors I have met.  He did not seek to platform himself, even we my husband and I asked him to compare himself with the other doctors.  He was gentle, but honest, as well informative.  He was patient with all of our questions and concerns and did not make us feel like we were dumb either.  His Cardiac Nurse Natalie Rudolph is amazing and a great support who will answer all the questions you need and, like Dr. Ilbawi, make you feel comfortable the whole way.  My daughter felt so comfortable with her that she walked to the operating room holding Natalie's hand.

Here is a picture of my daughter with Dr. Ilbawi, she never met him and to this day has not as he likes to focus on the procedure at hand.  Then once a year he has all the kids that he has performed surgery on for a family gathering with him. 

The next post I will post the day of her surgery for the repair of the coarctation.  This will not be her only surgery, but God knows all and knew this is all I could handle at this time.  It was enough. 

The PERFECT way to organize your homeschool!

So, if you have read my last couple of posts every year I try and find the best way to organize my school. 

Have you ever had a situation where people tell you over and over and over again about the way you should do things...but to.no.avail because you DON'T LISTEN?

Yeah, well this is that. 

This is the perfect site for all of your homeschooling needs:  donnayoung.org.  I have had friends telling me for years about it and have gone there, looked and left.  Not this time.  I have chosen to use the quarterly planner for my subjects to keep track.  I kind of started doing it the hand written form before, but was able to find a fill in form on her website and quickly did three subjects for 9 weeks for next year.  I can't wait.  I found THIS YEARS' organizational plan.  Each year I seem to change with how life is changing.  What new thing are you doing this year?

My Organized Homeschool Schedule...yeah, right!

So, I saw this picture on Google and fell in love with it.  Why, because that is how I feel.  Especially at the end of our homeschool year.  At the beginning, yeah I had it all together (at least it looked that way!).  But, truly it is hard to be organized trying to teach four kids, in three different grades.  So, as I do EVERY YEAR at the end of school I search the blogs.  For what, you ask?  For more ideas on how to coordinate our schooling, to make it better.  I take what I learned from last year, and try and tweak it.  I ALWAYS get to March or April and start DYING!  Literally.  I drop all my good ideas, creative incentives and just push toward the goal we all have...to be done!  I have many different ideas I have done in the past: 
*Progress Report Night
*Revised Workbox Idea
*Summary of things learned a couple of years ago

This year I started out with a new idea and it was great, but hard to keep up.  So, I switched to another one during the year.  Here is what I learned this year.  Hopefully, it will help you, if not be entertained.

I started this year with a chart (thought I had a picture, but can not find it. Will have to post when I do.) that my kids could move over a subject tab (that had velco on the back) to the done section.  I did this so they could keep track of their progress and then they wouldn't keep asking me if they were almost done.  This worked great, but I only got two done in time for school to start and the other two never got one...yeah, remember I am only semi-organized. 8-)  So, since I didn't have ones for all the idea went by the wayside.  So, I also found that one of my students (I won't label which one) kept saying he was done with his work, but would not complete all said tasks.  I would not figure this out until I would grade everything at the end of the week.  So, then I had to come up with a new system.  They all had a notebook and I would write the assignments in the notebook and then as they accomplished the work I would grade it and check it off.  Then they could get a sticker at the top of the page, should this happen they would get their three school dollars for the day.  At the end of the week, the school store would open and they could buy items (priced differently) at the store.  This worked great and if they didn't listen then I would take a school dollar away.  This worked great until March...then I just wanted to plow through and didn't enforce it so much...I paid for it.  We will do this next year. 

These are some of my ideas, and I have been researching some more.  I am always open to hearing new ideas.  Please let me know yours.  I will be posting soon about how I scheduled things.  It wasn't perfect, but maybe it would help you out in your scheduling.  That is what makes us all better picking ideas from others to work.  Now, if I could just finish what I start I would be on the right track!  One day at a time!

Homeschool, Year 4, has come to an end

Crazy, four years ago I didn't not think that I would be here.  Ending.  Year 4.  Four crazy years.  Each year I learn something from the previous and use it to make it better the next year.  Maybe by the time they all graduate I will actually have a great system down.

As we tie the last strings it gets harder and harder to focus, with the springtime air and the fun that can be found outside.  It is hard to look at math facts and see what you are suppose to be learning.

This year we made an awesome school room (see previous post here) and now we are MOVING IT

yeah, after ALL.THAT.WORK. last year...it is changing AGAIN!

What worked this year:

*School store (check)

*Report cards (check) (at least I had them at the beginning of the year)

*Set schedules (check)

*School check off sheets (check)

What DIDN'T work:

Yeah, I am not up for that right now...too overwhelming, I'm going to have to check back with you on that....

I still can't believe that I have a fourth grader next year, two second graders and a first grader.  It still does seem possible.  Not at all possible.  But, it is.  Each year flys by.  They get older, look older, you feel older, and you can't stop it.  It is a wonderful process.  To look back over a year and see the leaps and bounds your child has made.  That is MY FAVORITE thing about homeschooling...I have been there to see every step of the way.  I mean EVERY.  I might not have loved EVERY moment, but I have cherished EVERY moment. 

This is so not where I was headed with the blog post.  But, here is it.  Another down and another one to look forward to.  Exciting times to find.  I would love for you to share any of yours.  Good and bad.  We can all learn from both. 

Happy school ending!

Gymnastics Goofy

This semester I signed the three girls up for gymnastics.  They love to tumble and thought it would be fun.  For their class they had a performance.  A group of our college helpers in our youth group came out to support the girls on.  It was a goofy night with a group of goofy people. 

EIGHT!!!!!

Our crazy twins are eight.  Crazy. Eight. 

Crockpot Crazy

So, I am on a Crockpot Craze.  Silly.  I know.  But, I think it is great not having to think of the meal at the end of the day.  In the morning. Done.  Although, since I am trying new recipes dinner has not always been happy. 

Tonight I made Chicken and Sweet Potato Soup...yeah, I know, it didn't sound appetizing to me either.  I don't know why I did, but I tried something new.  I like chicken.  I like sweet potatoes.  Yeah, not going to happen again.  But, on the other hand I have found some great ones.  And it has made my life easier.  That is what matters, right? 

My favorite site right now is http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/.  You should try it out.  There are a lot of great recipes and the BEST PART is that she gives a verdict at the end if her family liked it.  It helps.  And no, to answer the question that is going through your head, I did not get the Chicken and Sweet Potato dish off her site.  Feel better?  Now go and check it out!

I want to find out what your favorite recipes are?  Please let me know!  I want to try them!!!

O.D.E. to Joy

Other than my kids loving the new "Friday" song by Rebecca Black, they love Friday because of O.D.E. (One Day Enrichment).  That is why I call it Ode to Joy.  It brings them JOY.  Seriously, it is one day a week where, as they like to call it, they go to school.  Yep.  I am not school.  O.D.E. is school.  It is a day where the kids have the classes that are harder to do at home, and are a lot more fun in a group.  This includes Science, History, Art, P.E. and Unit Study...and of course Lunch Period.  My husband is the gym teacher at O.D.E. and he took these pictures during a few classes that he has.  I mean, I would want to go instead of being with mom AGAIN...wouldn't you? 

 I like that they have this opportunity to go and learn from other teachers and learn in a different way than I might teach them.  They love their classes and have a chance to get a taste of "real school".  I do have to say that I am glad that I don't have to pack school lunches every day.  Once a week is enough for me. **Smile** 

I am thankful to Mr. Jones, the science teacher, this year.  He has made John realize that he loves science and now he wants to become a scientist when he grows up (or an artist).  Kiley has realized that she LOVES art.  I am excited to see where that goes.  Karli has learned to make a new friend this year, which has been a big thing for our shy one.  Next Friday will be the last one for the year.  I don't know what the kids will do without it for the summer...oh I know...more time with me!!!  I bet they can't wait!! 

Ebony and Ivory...again

As you can see John loves playing the piano, which is why later this month he has "decided" (with a little help from mom and dad) to play in a piano competition.  More to come about that.  Here he is showing off his piece that he played at the end of the year piano recital.  Karli played as well.  This was her second recital.  She wasn't even afraid to go up there this time.  Sadly, due to her practicing while I was working with the other kids on school work, I had NO IDEA what her piece was.  I know it shames me to admit it, but she did amazing and I was so proud of her.  Hearing it for the first time was simply nerve racking and exciting all at once.  Above and to the right is a picture of all the kids as they stand with their piano teacher Mrs. Johnson.  She is great and the kids love her. 

Race Car Derby

My oldest and his friends took a woodworking class together.  In this class they built these fabulous cars.  At the end of the session all the classes in the area raced their cars together.  They all won awards.  My sons came in second in his weight class and his friend in the middle came in first.  It was a lot of fun!  Great job guys!

Sponge Cake???

So, it has taken me a while to get this on here, but the time has finally come! Are you happy April? **Smile** April 1st. A day of fun. I love Family Fun Magazine for the creative ideas they have regarding April Fool's Day. Seriously, I don't know what I would have done without them the past few years! A few years ago put this post about a fun idea they had.  This year it was a sponge cake.  Not, any sponge cake, a cake actually made out of sponges.  Brilliant, I know.  It took a magazine to tell me the idea.  Yeah, people THINK I am creative, I just know the "special places" to find fun ideas. 

The kids were worried all day about what Mom was going to do to them.  They woke up thinking that I was going to make a fake breakfast.  Last year I fooled people on here that I was pregnant.  (Although that didn't work out too well because my youngest thought that I actually was and was quite disappointed when she finally figured out that I wasn't...yeah...note to self).  So, they were ready.  Thankfully they had O.D.E. and I had some time to figure it out.  So, the sponge cake it was.  I even baked a real one so the house smelled like I had been baking. *-)  That is what did it.  Look how excited they were that I made them a cake! 

Here is a video of how it all went down:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAMCawIUNdc