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Happy First Day of Summer!

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Hope StandingSummer is here without a doubt, and our house is not appreciating it.  Our AC quit on us yesterday so it’s up to a whopping 82 degrees in the house.  This is good news for you because it means I’m chilling with the kids in Jake’s office while he cleans and I get to write a blog, yay!  (Yes, that all must sound very strange, so I’ll explain.  Monday is his day off and it was cleaning day today and I was doing the cleaning like any good wife probably should, but then the baby needed help getting to sleep so I am getting a break while Jake does a few things.  Isn’t he awesome?  Yes he is.)

Anyway, so I owe you a bit of a catch up post.  This last couple of weeks has been rather tough for us.  Hope got her casts off at the beginning of the month, which I was looking forward to.  I thought she’d be happier without them, oh boy was I wrong.  The super loud little saw thing they use to get the casts off was traumatizing for her in every real sense of that word.  I was in Jacob’s post-op appointment and Jake was with Hope so I didn’t see any of it, but when I saw her afterward she was a terrible mess.  Her eyes were red from crying (rarely does she cry that much) and all the color was drained from her face.  She proceeded to cry the next 45 minutes until we could get back in the van to go home.

Jake told me how terrified she had been during the appointment; when the tech was trying to get her casts off she literally sat up on the bed and starting punching him.  This is not typical behavio,r as any of you who have followed along will probably realize.  Yes, she hits herself, but she is never violent toward other people.  He told me that he had never seen her that upset, even when she was in excruciating pain when her shunt failed last year.  Wow, has it only been a year since then? It seems like way longer.  Longest year of my life… so glad it’s over… anyway I digress.

When we got her home she did not improve.  Any time we would touch her, especially her legs or feet, she would jump and start screaming and crying.  Even if I accidentally brushed her toe while I was walking by it would cause a terrible fear reaction, any kind of touch at all was scary for her.  For the first couple of days I touched and moved her as little as possible.  We just tried to use very quiet, gentle voices and reassure her but it was like she wasn’t even hearing us.  She was not present.

Diaper changes, and putting her knee immobilizers and braces on were the worst times, and still are.  Whenever I would have to do any of those things it was like she wasn’t even in the room with me anymore, she was somewhere else reliving some horrible trauma, and I was the one triggering it.  The only way I could touch her without her screaming was to pick her up and wait a minute for her to calm down.  One time I did that, and when she came back to reality and stopped crying she just got very quiet and wrapped her arms as tightly around me as she could and grabbed my hair.  It was like she was holding on for dear life.  She’s never done that before, and while I’m glad she’s looking to me for safety, it was heart wrenching to see her like that.

It’s slowly getting better.  She has always had anxiety over people going near her legs and feet, so we are sure the casts must have caused her to have a flashback from some trauma long ago.  She also had other strange symptoms, fever, diarrhea,  seizure-like episodes, lack of appetite, etc.  We ended up having to take her to the ER (where I insisted she get some good drugs so as not to traumatize her more).  Nothing showed up in the tests and the meds they gave her worked great, she was very chill the whole time and didn’t remember it the next day.

She’s slowly improving.  My Hashimoto’s flared up very badly that week and the week after.  Stress is not good for autoimmune conditions, and I was quite devestated by the whole experience myself.  Now we are two weeks out exactly and things have settled down again.  I haven’t been blogging due to that and the fact that I no longer have a computer at the house.  We are rearranging our whole house from top to bottom and the desktop has not been set up the last two weeks so I really don’t have a great way to blog.  Planning on remedying that very soon.

In other news, we are starting school for the kids next week and everyone is very excited about that.  I figure we should probably start over the summer so that when life inevitably happens during the year we have some wiggle room and can still finish up all of our weeks by the end of the year.  And as for Facebook is concerned, I don’t miss it one little bit.  I really thought I would, but I haven’t.  I am so much happier without the drama of it all and the ridiculous amount of time and energy it took from my family.  I feel way more productive now and I’m overall more content and happier with life.  I’m more present with the kids.  It’s an awesome feeling.

And that is all for me!  But I do want to say, if you are interested in checking out another Lutheran pastor’s wife who is also adopting I suggest heading over to Hannah’s Blog.  They are adopting two kiddos and they are in-country right now!  Very exciting!!  Blessings on your week ya’ll!


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