FBF: A Great Year (and some HSBA news!)

Welcome to Flashback Friday!

It has been a great year.  A weird, busy, crazy, good year.

As many of you know, I had the above baby a little over a year ago.  He was a surprise from the very beginning.  We didn’t think we were having any more children.  Not that we didn’t want any more, but it just didn’t seem to be happening.  After having a miscarriage early in 2007, I just thought it was not to be.

But then the spring of 2008 brought the news that we were, without a shadow of a doubt, expecting a baby.  This time the pregnancy was healthy and made it past the first several weeks.  I was thirty-five years old.

Most of my pregnancy was wonderful.  I was healthy and energetic and because I was so busy all the time with the two older kids, it went by fairly quickly.

However, during the last trimester, I started having signs of pre-eclampsia again.  I had this with my first, Bonny Annie, twelve years earlier.  Generally, women only have this condition with a first pregnancy, but because I hadn’t been pregnant in eight years, my body apparently had forgotten my other two pregnancies.  I was already scheduled to have a c-section anyway, so my doctor just closely monitored my blood pressure and the baby’s growth, which can sometimes be stunted by this condition.  The baby was small, but he didn’t see any cause for alarm.

On November 19, 2008, we drove to the hospital to deliver our baby.  Jackson Henry was born around 8am, weighing five pounds, one and half ounces, and he was sixteen inches long.  He couldn’t breathe on his own or regulate his blood sugar.  Later that day we were told they thought he had an enlarged heart, an enlarged brain, and possibly some chromosomal issues.  He was placed in the NICU, and they began to run test after test.

It was the longest day of my life, and the start to the longest week of my life.

However, as the week progressed, so did our baby.  Almost every test they ran came back negative.  Jack Henry was small, but he was healthy and beautiful and strong.

Then on Thursday, November 27, 2008, Thanksgiving Day, we got to bring him home.

Yes, it has been a very great year. 

And yesterday, it got just a little bit better because I was officially announced as the winner of the Homeschool Blog Awards Funniest Blog for 2009!

I am overwhelmed.  Thank you so much to everyone who nominated and voted for me.  It is such an honor!  Make sure you click on the icon above and check out the winners for all the categories.  Some mighty fine blogs won, and I’ve had a lot of fun perusing them.