We have a date!

Put it on your calendars folks --- October 9th.


The stars (and Doctors) have aligned and this is our chosen date. All of the doctors will be in town and Madeleine will have received her Flu Shot and RSV booster for the month of October. The goal of the surgery is to reconnect her bowels and do an 'ostomy take down'. Essentially the colostomy bag will be gone and she will go to the bathroom just like every other kid. As long time readers may recall, we decided against this surgery in June 2008 and opted to take her home and let her grow before attempting another surgery. And then last fall happened..... Needless to say, ostomy reversal became very low priority after the events of last fall. The doctors anticipate this not being anything out of the ordinary and they have given us a ballpark of her being admitted for a week. This will be longer than her last surgery as anytime you mess around with the bowels they 'go to sleep' and you have to wait for them to 'wake up' before you can start advancing feeds. This can be a very long process, and for the really long time readers you may remember this being a problem when she first went to Children's to have her NEC surgery. We kept asking " what happens if her bowels don't wake up?" and they kept telling us that they would. Soooo, in essence it will be a waiting game. In the mean time mama bear will be sitting guard making sure that everyone washes their hands when they come into our room so that we don't catch any bugs while we are there.

As I posted last time, this has recently become more of an issue because Madeleine is all over the place and rolling on the floor is not conducive to keeping a bag on. Not nearly as dangerous as any of the issues we have addressed in the past, but I promise you - just as frustrating.

Madeleine is getting closer to crawling every day. We had a bit of a setback on feeding right after our swallow study and we attribute this to her dislike of barium. Who can blame her? However after a few days of giving her a break, I am happy to report she will once again open her mouth when I put a spoon near it. Brent commented that this seemed to really be frustrating me - and I'll be honest, it did. We both come from a long line of eaters and it is a core function to live. PLUS she did it before. It's the first time in a long time that once we hit a goal we had to step back and start over. Further, it was usually the first task I executed after walking in the door from a long day of work and 3 trains to get home. I JUST WANTED HER TO OPEN HER MOUTH... Alas, it's over with and we are back on track.


Until surgery we have a busy few weeks ahead of us. We hope to meet the newest member of the Hittle family ANY DAY NOW, we hope to catch a PSU football game and see Joel & Kathy from FL and both sets of parents.

Take care folks, if you are traveling this holiday weekend - be safe.

Madeleine, Kirsten & Brent