Tomorrow morning I'm going in to Edward Hospital at 5:30 am to have surgery on my right foot. None of us are looking forward to it, but we ARE looking forward to being done with foot surgeries! Fingers crossed that the 3rd time's the charm! We've been doing a lot to set up life at home for the next 5 weeks, as I'll be unable to walk without crutches, drive, or carry Ella.  Our night nurse has changed her shift from 10 pm - 6 am to 11 pm - 7 am so that she can get Ella up and dressed in the mornings. Our incredible school (and school district) is allowing Ella, Ava and Henry to ride the bus to and from school every day until I'm able to walk them! This was pretty amazing, since we're "walkers" so they would not normally allow Ava and Henry to join Ella (Ella DOES qualify for the bus because of her SMA, but since we live so close and are walking anyway, we've always had her walk with us). But this will relieve A LOT of stress about having the...

In the past year I have had two surgeries to correct pain I was having as a result of an old gymnastics injury. The injury was at the ball of my right foot, so I was referred to a podiatrist. During the exam, he said he could easily fix that joint by shaving down that part of bone that had grown over when my injury healed years ago. But I was also told that the main bone in my foot, leading to that joint, was too high and needed to be lowered. It involved cutting the bone, lowering it, inserting synthetic bone as a bone graft, and finally placing a small plate with screws to hold it all together. My initial X-ray taken "BEFORE" the first surgery last fall. I was told I would be "good as new" in three to four months. The recovery was a bit tough...I had to miss two weeks of work and I was in a boot cast for quite a while. We had to pay our babysitter to stay with our kids until Michael got home from school, since I was unable to lift Ella for those fir...

Many of you know this already from Facebook or word of mouth, but for those of you who haven't heard, we had to say goodbye to our beloved Sasa on August 24th. We knew she had a heart condition. We knew the end would be coming within 6 to 12 months (or possibly sooner). It was sooner. But luckily it was fast and she didn't suffer for very long. She was fine until she stopped eating. A couple days later she couldn't keep water down and became extremely lethargic. The vet had told us back in June that these were the signs that would indicate that it might be "time." We told the kids that afternoon that if she wasn't better in the morning, I would take her to the vet and we had to prepare ourselves that this might be the end for her. Sasa didn't end up making it through that night. A little after midnight, she lost control of her bowels and had a hard time getting in a comfortable position due to her weakness. And then she started crying. No...