Very long time, no post...

Whew, it has been a REALLY long time since the last post! Can't believe it was september!

Well, to briefly catch you up on what has happened...

Abbigail spent 8 days in hospital after the tendon release surgery to her left leg. The cast was a HUGE change for her, and she didn't handle it well. It made her reflux 10x worse... She began to refuse to feed, hence the return to hospital. She needed NG feeding, and slow introduction of bottle only feeding. Sarah had to completely give up physically breastfeeding. This was a great dissapointment for Sarah, but she continued expressing. Eventually Abbigail stopped losing weight and levelled off, at which point Abbigail was discharged and placed on weekly weighs to make sure she was continuing to put on weight.

The weighs produced a lot of concern for us, and the charts that we had received differed from each other a lot, causing confusion about how she was doing. The end result was that she is well below the 3rd percentile weight wise. And we were only guessing what her weight really was! We felt very in the dark, and she struggled to put on decent weight gains week after week, mostly they were mediocre gains, or no gains at all.

Her 6 week check up came, and the xrays showed that the problem of the first hip (dislocation of the joint) had occured in the right hip, and that the left may not have set in the correct place. So she was scheduled for a redo of the operation bilatterally, with another cast to go on. They booked us in to have the cast come off mid morning so we could have at least several hours of time with her with the cast off. Sounded like a great idea! We'd be able to give her a shower (as she had had several bowel blow outs requiring more than a simple nappy change!!!

The day came... We took her in to have the cast off, and they rightly warned us that she would be unhappy with the proceedure, and gave us ear muffs - good thing too, because she was screaming, and I had to hold her still. When the cast finally came off we realised why she was crying so much....

She had given herself a hernia - right where you might imagine that it would hurt the most should you have the inside of your abdomenal cavity pushing through the muscle wall. It looked like someone had stuffed a golf ball under the skin, and she was screaming the place down! So that was a really hard time. She was in such pain, and it could randomly pop out leading to a screaming fit, leading to exhaustion, and of course she hadn't eaten since early that morning, so by 5pm she was beside herself. She didn't know what to do with herself because the cast wasn't there, she ahd no leg strength or lower back strength. Putting her down wasn't an option because she felt really insecure, and started crying. So she was a great deal more settled by the time she had the second cast on.

The hernia has been an issue since then, popping out periodically, but over the last week it has popped out at least twice a day. So I think something may have to be done about that sooner rather than later.

We have in the last two weeks weened Abbigail to Formula, started solids for two meals a day, and just today (yes Christmas day!!!) she had her first tooth cut through her gum... SO it's been a fun old time, and it somehow seems that it's been one thing straight after another, or even during another! None of this waiting for one bad thing to finish before starting into the next thing... no... we do things the hard way. I'm told this kind of thing is supposed to build good character. DO I HAVE TOO??? Was my old character really that bad??!! I jest - I figure I should learn from these hardships what I can. They call it "good character" for a reason...

So Abbigail will be in her cast until mid march, at which point she will have spent 6 out of her 9 months in a cast from mid-chest to ankles, and these are the hottest months for us - we are having to strip her down to her bare cast quite frequently and we're only hitting highs of about 20 degrees celsius at the moment! Things could get a lot more uncomfortable over the next few months

She is adorable, and the light of both our lives. Here's some recent photos Sarah took of Abbigail that I simply HAVE to show off...

What a CUTIE!!! There are more, but this isn't the easiest way to show you 30 photos...

She keeps us enteretained with her coos, and giggles, shreeks of glee, the way she stares at us when we eat, the way her hair curls up after it's washed, her georgeous smiles that could win the hardest heart... She's amazing, and we are so amazingly blessed to be able to call her our daughter!

Take care all, and I'll TRY to blog more often...

Abe