For the last 2 weeks

One thing that we have been dealing with the last few months have been surgeries. Right at the end of November Caleb had hernia surgery. Nothing too major, but something that had to be dealt with. He was a great little man and made a quick recovery. There was a day or two that he walked around rather slow like, but came out with flying colors. (What the best part of the whole thing was the bandage on his incision was clear, so he could look at the blood and how it was healing up. He thought that was way cool.)


And then came Ashlyn's surgery. We knew she was going to have a surgery at some point due to a whole in the roof of her mouth. She had had a cleft palette when she was born, and had surgery in the Ukraine to help the problem, but it in need of some more help. On Christmas Eve we found out it was going to be on January 3rd. We didn't really have very long to prepare our hearts for this surgery, but that was probably God looking out for us.







The surgery took about 3 hours and she came out with about 115 stitches in the roof of her mouth. (This particular surgery normally happens here in the US when the child is about 9 months old, not 3 1/2 years old.) The doctor basically had to locate all of the muscles between the roof of her mouth and her nasal cavity, stitch them together, and reconstruct her soft palette. The hardest thing about the whole process is that she had to be on a liquid diet for three weeks. AAAHHHH!! A liquid diet for anyone is hard, much less when they are 3 years old. We are hopefully nearing the end of the 3 week period where she can go to soft foods and we can get back to normal.





We are very blessed to have had this surgery and I know it is going to help her in the long run, but we are getting ready to be done with it for a while. She really has been amazing through it all. We couldn't do it with all of the help and hand-holding from our parents, my aunt Carri, and from different people from church who came to support us.