Still working on this...

I remember not loving blogger. I stayed up 'till one thirty on NYE trying to get it set up. At my age, I should've know better. Oh well. I'll be working on it as I can but wanted to get it going.

As of today, we are less than 48 hours away from open heart surgery for our nine and a half pound bundle of wonderful. This will be where my mind and heart dump the emotions. I hope it's not too ugly.

On one hand we are amazed and fascinated at the ability of modern medicine to repair the body. Our older kids are doing Human Anatomy and Physiology this year and boy howdy, do we have context. I've been joking with their science teacher that by the time they get to the cardio-vascular system she could go on vacation for a bit and turn things over to R, J, and N. She knows better though. J is also doing her science fair project on Down Syndrome as well. Home schooling and life collide. ;).

The facts are stark: Charlotte has an atrial and ventricle septal defect. AVSD. Also a PDA but I haven't researched that one much. In laymen's terms it's two holes in the inner walls of her heart. All four chambers are affected. One thing that is a blessing and a curse is that she has pulmonary hypertension. High blood pressure in the lungs. Blessing is that it is keeping her congestive heart failure at bay. Curse - it is doing damage to her lungs. The lungs are sponges and hers are filling more with blood than oxygen. Thus getting to have surgery earlier rather than later. Surgery has a 95% success rate. I will admit to being more than distracted by that other 5%.

Our olders are doing okay. Some days. We all know this isn't an optional surgery for Charlotte. Some days there are quite a few tears over the what ifs but we're learning a very big lesson in 'one day at a time'. I will say that parenting the regular stuff while having a medically fragile baby is a balancing class I'm currently flunking. It looks a bit more like
swinging from one end of a pendulum to the other. We're all a little motion sick
from it. :/

I plan on putting up pictures and making this whole thing more readable but at the moment I'm
posting from my iPhone. Our computers are in the fritz and our
CD with the great pics (that I was doing Christmas presents with...yes a week late) is currently stuck in laptop number one that won't even turn on. Grrrrr....So for now it's the stripped down version.