HAYDEN IS HOME!!!!

Good news, folks! Baby Hayden has come home! Thank you all in advance for all of your prayers and well-wishes. I know that our friends appreciate them and they are grateful to have their littlest one home with them safe and sound. Hayden's ANC has steadily gone up and when they released him on Tuesday, it was over 2500! Because of the cleft palate, he is still having to use a feeding tube, but his pediatrician and the doctors at Dell Children's gave his folks clearance to take him home so long as they learned how to insert the tube themselves, which they have mastered. It's a lot of work for him to try and suck on a bottle, so they have to supplement with the tube in order to make sure that he gets the right amount of food to increase his weight. Because he is so small, he isn't allowed to lose any weight and will continue to have many pedi visits over the next few weeks to monitor that closely. But at least he is home.

I would have reported this earlier except that I have been sick the last five days with some sort of cold/summer flu/respiratory infection and too exhausted to do anything besides sleep. I started feeling ill last Friday and by Saturday morning I was so ill I had to call in the reinforcements (read: the grandparents) to come play with Sybilla for a bit so I could rest. Billa had Playtime with Papa while Mommy and Daddy slept. Michael wasn't sick, but he and my brother David has been up all night fixing the heater core issue in my SUV so that I could have working AC and just in time too... yesterday the thermometer in my car read 110F!!! My poor SIL Michelle has broken AC now too so I totally sympathize with her situation. Many thanks to my brother for taking time out of his weekend off to help us out...YOU ROCK!

Father's Day I felt a little bit better and we went and made dinner for Michael's dad. I really shouldn't have though as that night I got worse. [sigh] Sometimes I have too much energy for my own good! Monday was Michael's 27th birthday and I spent most of it sleeping. I feel so bad about being sick this weekend because both of Michael's special days were ruined. He spent most of his time watching the baby and taking care of me. I tried to make it up to him by making him a strawberry cake on Tuesday evening when I felt a bit better. We'll definitely be making up for it when we have his birthday party this Sunday. The Marino's are going to come out and make homemade hot wings and we're going to swim and grill burgers and enjoy a pirate ship cake, pictures of which I will post later.

Seeing as how I have missed three days of being in the office, it's time for me to play catchup. I'll post later on some of the funny things that Billa has been doing, but just wanted to make sure everyone heard the good news about Hayden!

Thanks again!
Kelly & the Gang