One Year Referral-versary!

Today is our one year referral-versary! One year ago today, we received the call that we had been matched with Li Xiao Fei, and that we had 48 hours to accept her referral. We saw her face for the first time, read her file, and knew right away that she was ours and we were hers. Here is a blog post about that day, and then one from when we got our pre-approval. It was a big day in our family and one that is worth celebrating and remembering! Here is the first picture we ever saw of our Calli Faith.

 

 

One year ago today, we read things like Li Xiao Fei “is a quiet and lovely child.” Today we know that she is not quiet at all, but is more than lovely to us!

 

One year ago today, we read things like Li Xiao Fei “has sound sleep, good appetite, and not choosy food.” Today we know that she does in fact sleep well, loves to eat more than almost anything, and that while she started out eating anything and everything, she has started to grow a little “choosy.” We take that as a sign that she is gaining trust, knows she will always have enough to eat, and is developing new tastes.

 

 

One year ago today, we read things like Li Xiao Fei “likes to be cuddled.” We loved that detail so much, and especially loved that someone was actually cuddling her. Today, we are very thankful that she has easily allowed us to be the ones to cuddle her, and we love the time we spend holding her, after waiting so long for her to be in our arms.

 

One year ago today, we read things like Li Xiao Fei’s “language development is delayed,” but that she “can shake her head to refuse things she does not like.” Today we know that while her language is delayed, due mostly to her cleft, we have absolutely no problem communicating, either way. We know what she wants and she very much understands every single thing we say. We are amazed with how quickly she understood English, we are thankful for her speech therapy, and for all the amazing medical care we have had access to for her.

 

One year ago today, we read things like Li Xiao Fei “does not like to stay alone,” “likes getting along with others,” and “has a ready smile.” Today we know that she loves her friends, loves being with her family, and has the most beautiful smile in the world. Her personality is so fun and she just fits into our family perfectly. She is definitely one of us!

One year ago today, we saw her picture, read her file, and knew right away she was our baby. We are so excited to be celebrating our first Thanksgiving with her home with us, and we are amazed at the way God placed her in our family.

Calli's 6 Month Forever Family Day!

6 months ago (yesterday), Calli became a part of our family forever! This was our first picture after she was officially ours.

 

6 months feels like it has flown by! We have been so busy adjusting to being a family of 5, helping Calli transition into our family and our home, celebrating birthdays, having surgeries, procedures, doctor's appointments, and speech therapies. It has been a whirlwind!

She is doing so, so well! She is very attached to her mama - which I love! She loves wrestling with her daddy and loves for him to tickle her. When he stops, she asks for more! She loves playing with her sisters and wants to do everything they do. Cooper and Calli are either best friends or...not so best friends. :) Being just a year apart is really fun sometimes and not fun other times. She gets so excited when Kendall gets home from school and Kendall can pretty much do anything with her and she loves it. We just love these three precious girls.

She's still sleeping all night (most nights) and eating well. She doesn't have to have quite as many snacks throughout the day. She's drinking from a straw now! Her speech is progressing - we know what she is trying to say a lot of the time and she knows what we are saying all the time. We have started speech therapy and will increase this now that we are post-palate surgery.

We went for her post-op appointment for her tubes with the ENT and she passed her hearing test! She did not pass it before her surgery, because she had so much fluid in her ears. He said she looks great and he doesn't need to see her for 6 months! Yesterday was her follow up with our cleft doctor, Dr. T, and he was impressed with how her palate and her lip are continuing to heal! He said her scar looks great and that her palate is great! Next step is to have a meeting with the whole cleft team, to especially focus on letting the speech specialist meet with her. He said he wants to be aggressive with that, but that she also still needs more time for her palate muscles to heal and relax, so we scheduled that for 6 months from now. It's so nice to have a break from all the surgeries, procedures, and appointments!

I get to be the one to rock Calli before bed every night. Randy tries, but she still chooses me to be the one to put her to bed. Every single night, I am overwhelmed by the wonder of how she became ours and how we became hers. This sweet little girl that did not come from my body lays against my chest, snuggles her head into my neck, and completely relaxes and trusts me. It's amazing to me! I'm amazed that I get to be the one to be her mama. This has been an awesome 6 months, and we can't wait to see what the next 6 months hold!

Calli's Second Birthday!

I just realized I never posted about Calli's birthday on this blog! Here is the original post from her and Cooper's combined birthday party.

 

Cooper has been so excited "for August 31st." She has been saying the date of her birthday for a couple of months now and it's so cute the way she says it. I have it on video somewhere. We figured Calli would be happy with whatever Cooper picked for the birthday party, so a couple of months ago I asked Cooper what she would like. She has been obsessed with school buses for awhile now, so she immediately said she wanted a school bus party! So funny. So, I looked around online and, turns out, there have been lots of people that have had school bus parties - except all the ones I saw were for boys. Oh well. Our little Cooper loves school buses. So that's what we did!

We love that it's in summer, and that we get to have a swimming party outside. We just can't ever plan on that in February for Kendall's birthdays. So we planned on a splash party, in the front yard, on their actual birthday, August 31st.

This was my favorite part. Randy and I have been working on it for several weeks now, trying to get most of it ready before Calli's surgery a couple of weeks ago. We made it out of foam insulation board, and it was perfect for kids to take pictures behind!

 Cooper originally was saying that everyone should wear yellow to her school bus party, so Granny bought the girls bright yellow swimsuits. They were adorable!

We had lots of family drive all the way down for the party! Pops and Kiki, Great Granny and Aunt Auggie came down and stayed in a beach house all weekend, Granny and Papas came, and Gigi and Peeps brought Aunt Val and Dohe, Gracie, Evy and Oliver. Randy's two aunts also came, Kathy and Brenda, along with Brenda's husband Wayne, and his cousins Kaity, Keelie, Emily, Kyle and their three, Maelie, Lorelai and Laine. We had lots of family here and it was so fun!

Lots of sweet friends came, too, to help us celebrate! We are so thankful for the awesome community God has placed us in and we love all our friends so much! 

I loved the school bus cakes the girls had! Cooper was so very excited about these. We even had cupcakes with stop signs on them, which is her other very special thing!

 We sang Happy Birthday to the girls separately. Cooper was pretty shy, but Calli just sat and looked around at everyone, taking it all in. Sweet girl - we loved celebrating her first birthday with us!!

 

 

Cooper was pretty excited about opening presents this year. Calli even got into it a little bit!

 Our sweet friends, Amber and Garrett let us borrow their awesome water slide for the party! It was perfect for the age of the kids we had and they just loved it.  

When the party was over, Calli asked Granny for a little more cake. Of course!

 

 We love celebrating these girls and having parties! Happy school bus party, Cooper and Calli!!

Palate Surgery

Calli's surgery to close her palate was last Thursday, August 15th. Exactly three months post lip surgery and 4 months after we brought her home.

Our doctor told us to expect this recovery to be much harder. To expect a 3-4 night hospital stay, and that she would be "puny" for about two weeks post surgery. We have been so impressed with how well Calli has done with everything so far, that I think we didn't really believe him. Turns out he was right. We have had a rough week.

Thursday morning we had to be at the hospital at 6:00. Granny came down to LJ on Wednesday, so she was home with the big girls so Randy and I could take Calli. We had a couple of hours in pre-op before they took her back for surgery at 8.

Surgery took about 3 hours, just like Dr. T told us it would. Gigi and Peeps came down and sat with us during surgery, which helped pass the time. I have started sewing Calli's stocking, so that helped keep my hands busy, too! Our ENT put tubes in her ears first, and drained a lot of fluid. It is very common for children with clefts to need tubes because fluid builds up. She'll probably have several sets of tubes over the course of her childhood. It was great to just be able to do it while she was already under for palate surgery. Dr. Roy came out and told us that he was able to place the tubes, that it went fine, but that he drained a ton of fluid and she has "unusually small ear canals." At 11:30, Dr. T came out and said everything went well! Then we had to wait to be told we could go back and see her in recovery - that was the hardest part for me! Knowing she was waking up but hadn't been taken to recovery yet - we just wanted to be with her. I think it was only about 15 minutes until they took us back, but that was the longest wait of the morning.
Here she is with Randy in recovery. She was sleeping much more this time than the previous two procedures. The sweet nurse took her quilt and baby back with her for surgery and when we came in to recovery, we saw that baby even had a bandage. So cute! They put the no-nos on her arms again, just to keep her from sticking her hands in her mouth. We took them off at some point in recovery and never had to put them on her again - thankfully.

Feeding her some juice with a syringe. Sweet baby was so thirsty and I lost count of how many syringes of juice we gave her - more than a dozen.

Her drool was very bloody, so we kept blankets or towels on us most of the first day. After about two hours in recovery, they moved us up to our room and Gigi and Peeps met us up there. She just wanted to sleep/lay on me, and I was so happy to just let her!

 Thursday was just a long day of letting her sleep on and off, and trying to keep her comfortable. She had morphine every hour or so most of that day, and she was on some other kind of pain killer as well. She drank some the first day, but I don't think she ate much. This is how we slept that night - her on my chest and Randy on the couch next to us. We were up every hour or so, but she was at least able to rest some.

Friday morning started around 5:30, so by 8 or so we were ready to get out of the room. There was a very fun play room on our floor, so we carried her down there and played for awhile. Anything to keep her distracted!

She grabbed her cup shortly after surgery and would not let it go the rest of the time we were in the hospital. In fact, she is still sleeping with it at night. So now we have baby, cup, quilt, and a little puppy the girls brought her when they came with Granny. It's a full bed.

The ipad helped keep her distracted, as well. Her face swelled a lot, and it changed a lot throughout the first couple of days. She would lay on one side and then sit up and her face would be swollen a different way. We were glad when the swelling started to go down.

 We had several visitors that helped pass the time so well! Gigi and Peeps stayed all day Thursday, Kathy and Mary came to see us Thursday evening, Lindsey came Friday morning, Mary and Nathan came and brought us dinner Friday night, and Michelle and Kaitlin came and brought us Sprinkles cupcakes Friday night. But the most exciting visitors for Calli were her big sisters. Granny brought them on Friday and she got excited for the first time our whole visit when those sweet girls walked in! They brought her some balloons, flowers, and a baby puppy, but she was mostly just excited to see them. Kendall and Coop were so sweet, hugging on her and talking so gently to her. Lindsey had brought some markers and coloring sheets, so the girls loved coloring those together. We all went and ate lunch in the cafeteria, and then when we came back, Calli fell asleep on Granny. She was enjoying having her Granny hold her, which gave me a little break - up until then I had been holding her the whole time.

 Friday night went much better than Thursday night, and by Saturday morning at 7, the doctor had come in to tell us we could go home! It took awhile to get our prescriptions ready, so we left around 11 and were home by noon! Granny and Papas had cleaned the whole house, went to the grocery store for us, and picked up lunch and dinner. They took the girls to swim while we napped with Calli, and we were so thankful for all their help!

Mary and Kathy even organized meals for us for this week after surgery! I didn't think we would need it, but her recovery has been so hard and she has just wanted to be held all the time that it has been so great to not worry about food. Kathy and Jerry Peters came over Sunday afternoon with a LARGE ice chest full of Bluebell, popsicles, and chocolate syrup! So fun! We've had meals from the Hundls, Erskines, Picks, Mitts, Hendersons, Whiteheads, Coopers, and Watsons. I can't even say how thankful we have been!!

So our week has been spent at home, in our pajamas, just being lazy and taking care of Calli. She has been waking up three to four times a night and has been on pain meds every three hours. Today (Friday) has been the best day yet and we're hopeful she is getting better! Kendall and Cooper have been such big helpers - mostly by being easy so I could focus on Calli. They've gotten a little extra tv time this week, more time on the computer, and had a lot of time just playing together. They've been great. Calli and I have been rocking, walking, trying to eat some, and just sitting together. I've been so thankful for the way she has let me love on her and comfort her - I think I'll post about that later.

She's eaten a few bites of mashed potatoes, some yogurt, green beans, lots of ice cream, and even some cereal! She's so tough and brave - and maybe starving - that even though it hurts after just a couple of bites, she keeps trying new things! We're amazed at her.

Some days she's just needed to ride in the carrier and stay close. And I'm ok with that! BTW - she has her puppy and her cup somewhere in there. It never leaves her these days! 0

 This week has been hard, but we are so impressed with Calli and amazed at her bravery. It must be so strange to have a roof of her mouth when she's never had anything up there before, to breathe a different way, and to have the amount of pain that she has had. But she has been so awesome, has let us love on her, and has just been great! We're so thankful! Thank you for your prayers for her!

Oh - yesterday was our post-op appointment with Dr. T and he said everything looks like it should! He said to expect her behavior to be like this for about another week. She is collecting food in the roof of her mouth, which looks bad to us, but he said that is to be expected and isn't a problem as long as she is drinking. He said she is very impressive and very beautiful. We knew that! We'll go back and see him in 6 weeks!