God Is all around us

Wow it has been an insane week. Kallison had to go back into the NICU IMC due to her not being able to keep her temperature up, Aida had several desats which are very scary, if you have been in the NICU you know what it feels like for the monitors to start beeping without knowing what the problem was. These monitors are high tech, but sometimes they give false readings and it makes it difficult to know when there is a true reading. It is still so hard to leave them at the hospital every night, but we know it is best for them to get the care they need since they are premature. I guess Kristi and I were naive in thinking that because their weights were high enough they would be ok and it would be smooth sailing home. Moving on...

Thursday was probably the worst day i had in this journey, but it ended up really helping. I got sick, not sure with what, but I was coughing bad and it was productive (as our resident nurse says) so I called the nurse on duty and told her and she said to stay home. It was tough but i knew it was best for the girls and the other babies in the NICU IMC so I stayed home and tried to rest, i say tried because I had not been able to get much (if any) sleep since Sunday and it finally caught up to me. By Friday night I was feeling better to drive, but not to go in so I drove Kristi up and dropped her off at the door, I didn't know what i would do so I went outside, walked around for a while and finally stopped at the entrance to the hospital. I was just kind of sitting there and knew the Chapel was there but didn't figure it would be open, so i sat for a while longer, until i felt it calling which was strange so I went and checked the door and sure enough it was open. I went in and wrote a little prayer for the girls, and sat down to pray, and finally everything came out, all of the stress, pain, emotion came and I was looking and feeling pretty bad. I kept praying for God to give them strength and for Him to give us the strength we needed to help our little angels. And as I was continuing to pray an older lady came in and did the Rosary at the alter, and by this time I was a wreck. She continued praying for her husband (I found out later) and when she was done she came and sat next to me and gave me a big hug and told me her story. Her husband had been in for two months and on Saturday they got some good news. She has amazing strength and we sat there talking for a while reassuring each other and I had Aida's hat and i gave it to her, not sure why, but then she took it up to the alter and had it blessed, I will keep it with me until they are released and then Aida can have it back :)

So after all this I felt a lot better and Friday evening I was feeling good enough to go see the girls and was not coughing or anything. The girls were doing great and it was nice to see them again, but hard to leave them. Saturday we felt God talking to us through the people around us. At the car dealership we met a guy who had a son in the NICU who was born at 1lb 9ozs at 24 weeks and he is now 11 years old and doing awesome!! This made our day knowing that there are others who have been through what we are going through makes it slightly more bearable. Then we went back to the hospital in our new CR-V and when i say our i mean Kristi's :), and were sitting with the girls and getting them ready to eat when the phone rang and the nurse asked if we would allow our Pastor to come by and see us. It was awesome that him and his wife Stephanie were able to come by and pray with us and give us some reassurance that everything would be ok. If you live in Helotes or the San Antonio area check out Gateway Fellowship, it is a great place to go to church, even if you are not a "church person" (whatever that is). Its not your traditional church, if you like contemporary you will love this church, John has a lot of energy and he has a positive message. His wife is also the Nursery Director at the church so we will be seeing a lot more of her with our two little angels. They both held the girls and prayed with us which made our night.

After we left we went to Walmart and I HATE walmart yes i know I am not supposed to, but it puts so many places out of business and lowers the wages and extends the work hours of every place around it...ok time to take sociologist hat off....

Ok that's better. So we were walking around walmart and trying to find stuff to get organized because my babysitter from 20 or so years ago said we have got to get organized, she runs a daycare from the house so she knows what it takes. We found a lot of stuff that we needed and finally we went to the baby section (our new favorite section of any store!!!!) and were looking around when this young couple next to us asked Kristi and I if we went to Gateway and we said yes and they had been a part of John's fellowship team on Thursday and had been praying for us and asked how the girls were doing, man the love from God was flowing in walmart because on our way out the lady at the register asked how we were doing and we said tired, we got to talking and apparently her daughter had a preemie, and the lady in line behind us had a preemie as well and they were telling us their success stories. Wow it made us feel a whole lot better to hear these stories and has taken some of the edge off. Also quite a few of the babies from the NICU were released today as well so we were happy to see that they were able to go home. Now we are just praying that it will be our turn soon.

Well I am going to get some sleep, tomorrow is going to be a long day...