Month: September 2009

My daughter loves playing with the cat. He’s an ornery old fella, and sometimes he decides he doesn’t like playing little girl games. This was one of those times!

With both of the girls learning to ride their bikes this summer, a couple of weeks ago I surprised Adriana and got us both bikes so we could ride together as a family. We’ve enjoyed rides around our neighborhood, to the park, on some trails behind our home, to get pizza and Italian Ice, and even an adventurous (and a bit scary) 5.5 mile ride to St. James (which we won’t be doing again any time soon. Too many NY drivers flying by us. The girls did awesome and were such troopers, though! For now we’ll just stick to less congested roads near the house.) We’ve really had a great time sharing this fun new hobby together and look forward to many more shared experiences on the bikes!

Parents: Stop fretting so much about which high school your youngsters attend or how they score on the SATs. If you want your student to make it to a bachelor’s degree, it’s far more important for him or her to earn at least B’s in high school and reach for the best possible college. Oh, and saving a few thousand bucks by sending your kid to a community college could turn out to be an expensive mistake.

Some of the nation’s best-respected educational researchers are likely to reconsider much conventional wisdom today with the release of surprising findings from an analysis of educational records of more than 200,000 freshmen who started at public four-year colleges in 1999.

Read the full article with findings here.

I just wrote this whole note and it erased on me!! So here we go again!! I texted as many people as I could think of today but for those of you who don’t know TOMMY GOT HIS TUBE OUT TODAY!!!!!!!! PRAISE JESUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am so sorry I left you all with that sad note this morning and didnt’ have a computer nearby to let you all know. But now you do! I am so elated it’s not even funny!! Praise God for His faithfulness! He is so good! Just when I had felt like I was losing hope and couldn’t wait anymore He blessed us with this. So i guess 9/9/09 WAS a good day after all. Someone told me that the number 9 means something like fruitful and a harvest. Well, there was definitely a lot of fruit that came out of this trying time that God has done. There is a song I sang in church awhile back called “You are Good” I think, by Point of Grace. Every verse has a different situation and how God is still good in it. Then there’s the one verse that talks about the storm, “when the world has gone gray and the rains here to stay you are still good” And He is! That song just kept replaying in my head for days. He’s taught me so much about His faithfulness and love throughout this whole ordeal. Even when things weren’t going the way I thought they should, He was still good and I kept praising Him. Then this morning when I felt like I was at the end of my rope I sat down to read my devotional of the day and it was all about having patience and trusting in God. It talked about how we can’t expect to have those things just instantly but He allows trials and situations for us to practice them. And I knew He was just talking to me telling me He would help me through this but He’s teaching me something in the process.
So, I was just worshipping Him on my 45 minute drive there and prayed for strength as I walked into his room and what did I see before me??!! Tommy sitting up in bed with NO TUBE DOWN HIS THROAT!! I just stood there in awe for like 10 seconds frozen with my jaw at my ankles and said “is the tube gone?!!!!” I threw down my stuff and ran to the bedside and hugged and kissed him. I was beyond ecstatic! I stopped and we just prayed together thanking Jesus because I don’t want to just come to Him when times are tough but to remember to thank Him when He answers our prayers. We just prayed and cried and hugged and were just sooo happy!!!
He can talk too! I heard some people can’t talk for a couple of days and I thought his throat would hurt so bad but he is really not in a lot of pain and he talks just above a whisper so I have to lean in to make sure I hear all he has to say so he doesn’t have to repeat himself but it’s a million times better than pointing to letters on the clipboard! So not only is he talking, but they got him out of the bed today and sat him up in a chair. He got to “eat” today too. Liquids only like jello and soup and stuff. He finally got the ice chips he had been begging us for. He was entirely happy and grateful to have so much more than just a wet swab in his mouth to stop the dryness! And I was so happy to see it!! The doctors were saying how amazing he was doing for only being off the tube today and will maybe be out of ICU and itnto a regular room by tomorrow or Friday. A lot of the nurses who helped take care of him this past week kept popping in all day to see him and said how happy they were to see him up and better. It was so nice! Tommy was so overwhelmed at their sincerity and was thanking the ones he remembered for taking such good care of him. That’s another thing, they all said he would remember nothing of this past week but he remembered alot! I kept asking him if he remembered stuff he said and we said to him and he actually did for most of it! I was talking all day to him about everything that went on and told him about all of you who have been reading and concerned and praying for him and commenting everyday with words of encouragement. He was just blown away by all the people who care about him and us and was pretty teary eyed most of the day. Overwhelmed by everything and how God’s gotten him through it.
So this has been the best day by far!!! Barring the day he finally gets to come out of the hospital with me!! I cannot wait til we are back home with all of you, but at least now the worst is hopefully over and we can just be together waiting for him to fully recover to leave.

Just spoke with Naomi who was really excited because Tommy got his breathing tube out today! Yeah! He’s talking, but with a bit of an understandable whisper, as I am sure his throat is sore. Nevertheless, he is surely relieved to have it out.

I am getting up at 4 a.m. and going to LaGuardia. I am flying out to San Diego to spend a couple of days with Tommy and Naomi. Pray that I will be able to be a support and a blessing to them. Also pray for safe, good travels.

Today was another great day! He didn’t come off the ventilator yet but he is getting sooo much better. The doctor is hoping tomorrow to really do it. He is at 40% oxygen and the peep is down to 5. He did breathing exercises today where they almost completely take him off and he just sits and breathes on his own. He did it this morning for about 2 hours and then again this afternoon for the same. He did very well! His oxygen levels stayed up everything else was reading well. So they think they’ve got a great chance tomorrow! Praise God! We also just had a great time together as a family with him. He was wide awake today and was able to communicate with us. We have a clipboard with the letters of the alphabet written across it and he points to letters to spell words he’s trying to say. We could see his real self today. He was joking with us and making fun of us and stuff. :-> He would take all this time to spell out sentences just to make us laugh. He asked us if we ate butterscotch rocks pancakes at Ihop and we sadly had to tell him they told us they discontinued it. He playfully hit me cuz those are his favorite! Also another time he wanted me to take off the cold cloth from his forehead and when I asked him if he wanted me to re-wet it and put it back on he made a face like “of course” and then spelled to his parents “is she new?” Because he is ALWAYS hot. At another point he was doing this funny handshake with me that we do sometimes. Just a lot of things like that. We were cracking up most of the day at how lucid and sharp he was and just the things he was saying and doing. It was so nice to have his brother and sister here. They have to leave tomorrow, so it was wonderful they had a full day where he was really awake and knew they were there. He and his brother got to chat about sports and stuff. And we watched tennis and stuff together. It was a good time.