Seriously, poor Shiloh was born into a chaotic time for our family. If you've been reading you know that we had our fair share of trials leading up to December. Things seemed to be settling down and I was prepared to spend my last few days before Shiloh's birth cleaning and spending time with my other three.
But on Monday December 22nd, Hannah woke up with a high fever a sore throat. We went ahead and took her to the doctor because I thought she had strep. My thinking was that she would get an antibiotic and still be good to come to the hospital on Wednesday. Oh no -it couldn't be that easy, Hannah tested positive for the flu. I'm not worried or paranoid about the flu at all. We've had it in our house before and survived. I was more upset that the kids wouldn't be able to come to the hospital to meet their new baby brother. So she and the other two began taking Tamiflu and she was actually fever free for the first time on the day that Shiloh was born. We were still cautious when we came home from the hospital just to make sure sweet Shiloh didn't get sick.
Leading up to my delivery I was diagnosed with Pregnancy Induced Hypertension. My bp was fairly high and I was sent to the hospital for overnight observation and then put on mild bed rest. Bed rest with three kids and the craziness we were dealing with is almost laughable. There wasn't a lot of bed resting to be honest. The cure for PIH is delivering the baby and while in the hospital my bp was beginning to ever so slowly come down. But the day after we were released I noticed my right foot swelling -not just a little but a lot. Bobby bought a bp monitor and we saw that my bp was going up instead of coming down and that was with me taking my bp medicine. This resulted in several doctors visits and more blood work.
I have been sharing this testimony with everyone because it is such a blessing to see how the Lord provides and heals us! The day we got home from having my blood work done (Tues), I noticed our neighbor was having some tree work done but I didn't think anything of it. I went inside and took Shiloh into our bedroom to nurse and lay down for a nap. I heard Bobby talking to someone in our living room and couldn't figure out who it was. When I came out I saw our friend Tom M. that we used to meet with when we were a part of a house church group. Let me just say that the Lord has blessed Tom with the gift of healing and my heart just leapt with excitement when I saw him standing there. I knew the Lord had sent him to pray for us. We told him everything that was happening and asked him to pray. He immediately put his hands on my foot and began to pray. That afternoon the swelling in my foot began to go down. When I went for my next check-up my bp was still high but was starting to come down again. I know it was Tom praying for us and the Lord healing my body. It makes me cry to think that when we so frustrated and tired and couldn't even think of asking for help that my Heavenly Father sent someone to help us. Blessings!!
On January 1st Hannah celebrated her 9th birthday. I was relieved that we made it without any illness because normally someone in our house is sick on her birthday. We even managed to have a small party for her and I'm so glad that she had a blast even though it wasn't much.
But I spoke to soon. The very next morning Amos began throwing up and was sick all day long. Saturday everyone was fine so we thought maybe it was just Amos and the rest of us would be fine. But no, Sammy began throwing up at 1am Sunday morning. Then Bobby began to feel sick. By late morning I was have stomach cramps and potty issues. That was a rough day. It's hard to take care of three kids and nurse a newborn when you just want to sleep and not deal with anything. At 1am Monday morning it hit Hannah. Poor Bobby was working so hard to take care of all the sick kids while I just focused on keeping Shiloh quarantined in our bedroom and feeding him. Our hands were raw from washing them so much -though it didn't do much good. For several days we were all just tired and barely had an appetite. I felt bad that Bobby spent his two weeks off helping take care of sick kids rather than getting to spend quality time with Shiloh. And I honestly didn't get much of a recovery period because I was just kind of thrown into all that craziness and I knew I had to do my part to help and make things at least a little easier on Bobby.
It's just laughable to look back and see everything that we've gone through the past few months. In all seriousness it's definitely made us turn to the Lord even more, become persistent in prayer and see that His ways our certainly much higher than our ways considering I would have chosen the easy way for us! But you hit the point where you don't even get mad or stress anymore -when your child starts throwing up at 6am you just laugh and move on.
I want to close by telling you that we've been blessed beyond measure. A friend of ours gave Hannah a free month of tumbling at our local tumbling center, the men at Bobby's men's Bible study took up an offering for us and the amount was so overwhelming it made us cry, Bobby has a new car that has a warranty, Shiloh is still so laid back and sleeps so well at night that we're not sleep deprived zombies staggering around during the day and the kids have still been able to participate in their activities (AWANA, Upward, tumbling) even though we have a newborn and a 2 y/o. There are certainly more but those are the major ones. :-)
Bobby & his sweet baby boy
A fun game of knock the Boppy off of each others heads.
Pure cuteness. This booger says he's not 2, he's 8!
"I take him now Mama."
Milk coma. I love when babies sleep with their mouths open.
