Happy 6th month birthday Hannah!!!


Hannah has been growing wonderfully. She is actually fitting in her 6 month clothes and is progressing better than the doctors had expected. Her vision teacher from TARC came over today and she has been amazed at the ability of Hannah's vision since day one. Hannah doesn't show any signs of having any vision problems. When an object is placed in front of her she will see it, reach for it and grab it. Yesterday was Hannah's first day going to church and someone that was watching Hannah approached Sam and the conversation went something like this:


Guy: Well, we haven't heard anything new about Hannah. How is she and how is she doing. I mean, I'm not a doctor or anything like that and it looks like she can hear and it looks like she can definitely see...


Sam: (laughter)...Yeah that's what they told us at the very beginning, but she can see and hear.

Hannah just past another great milestone. She rolled over today (3/10/2010)! I know most parents think it is a big day when their child rolls over for the first time, but I will argue that this was a much bigger accomplishment for Hannah in our eyes. When she was 7 weeks old she had a CT scan done on her head after she was having siezure like symptoms (they didn't happen to be siezures) and the doctors were able to compare it with her CT scan when she was only a couple of days old. She had been born with a normal size brain and they told us then that she wasn't going to have the Retardation of development from the CHARGE acronym. Well, at 7 weeks they said her brain hadn't grown much and they prepared us for the worse (doctors are good at preparing for the worst). This particular doctor has a nephew that has developmental problem and he said that his nephew didn't show any signs of retardation until he didn't roll over at 6 months and from then on things became more pronounced in his nephew. So he informed us that she may miss some of her mile stones and have brain capacity issues. Well, today on exactly her six month birthday she rolled over!!! And you know what, she hasn't missed any of her mile stones yet, she can see, she can hear, and she is growing wonderfully. She is surpassing all expectations that the doctors had given her. You go girl!

Unfortunately everything can't go as planned with Hannah. This past week Hannah started to throw up her feeds again. It was sad because when Hannah gets set back it takes her a while to get going again. So we made an important and hard decision, we were going to try and force her to bottle feed. Yes, we were going starved our little girl. It was extremly difficult for us, but this is the only way that we can help Hannah get rid of her Mic-Key button and help her to start eating like a typical child. We decided this after her 9am feed so from then on we only offered her the bottle. At first she didn't want any part of it, but then by 7pm she decided that she would eat some. She took an ounce and didn't even spill a drop out of the side of her mouth. This was enough to help calm herself down, but it wasn't nearly enough for her body to grow. 2 hours later she took the bottle again and the entire time that she was eating she would be sucking on the bottle, but also complaining about how she didn't like to eat from the bottle. It was kind of cute. She took another ounce agian at 1am. Everytime after she took about an ounce or less she started to get too tired and couldnt breath and eat at the same time. By this time my heart was being torn apart because several times throughout this process she would be crying because she was hungry. It hurt me to watch my daughter be so hungry and she couldn't do anything about it. By 3am I started to give her the normal feeds of 4 ounces.

So we tried. Our emotions got the better of us and we started to feed our child again. Until next time she will be a content little girl and get more than enough food :)

Thank you to everyone that have prayed and are still praying for Hannah. She has overcome so much and we know it is because that our Heavenly Father has blessed her through your prayers and the blessings that she has received. Hannah has been a great blessing in our family and we are extremely excited to watch her grow and develop into a beautiful little child.

Ricky