The Good, The Bad, The Utterly Amazing Part 1

We are now eight months into this parenting medically fragile twins/parenting seven kids thing. I think 37 is a bit young to be pre-menopausal so I am going to attribute my violent mood swings during this time to the fact that it has simultaneously been so much better and so much worse than I ever imagined. Going in we had no idea what any of this was going to look like. We heard words like "ventilator" and "trach" and "g-tube" and could only make fairly uneducated guesses at what they were. At the end of last summer as we visited the twins in the hospital the nurses would spoon feed us tiny bits of information to go home and digest. By the end of July I was in full on panic attack mode. I was freaking out. I kept thinking, they are not in our home yet, we haven't signed anything, we can still get out of this. I know, super mature and so loving. But Jason, the one who was usually trying to talk me OUT of having more kids, was steadfast and completely immovable. He was convinced they were from the Lord. I am so grateful he was the rock when I was the jello. Isaiah had his trach and g-tube surgery on July 23rd. I was there when he came out of surgery. He was in so much pain and so tiny and innocent. After I was over my fainting spell I sat next to him and prayed. And God washed me in a wave of love for this precious child. I warned God that choosing a fainter to parent a child with all these holes in him was risky, but if He thought it was a good idea then I would give my all to make this child happy and healthy one day. August 1st Faith came home from the hospital. She was on oxygen and an apnea monitor. The sleep deprivation was on. In the beginning she was so small and could eat so little at a time that we had to wake her every 3 hours to eat - even at night. Which meant we never got more than 2 hours sleep in a row and even that was not likely when her apnea monitor was going off 5-6 times a night. Simultaneously we were still making the 2 hour round trip drive to visit Isaiah as often as possible, Jason and I taking turns staying home with the other 6. It was grueling. I wavered between wanting Isaiah home so that we were all atleast under one roof to realizing that once he came home the real work began.