First of all, thank you for the words of encouragement after my last post. Writing about it all helped me so much. Telling our story Saturday night helped, too. I was really nervous about talking but at the same time, I was so ready to talk. Telling our story helps me keep the Big Picture of what God is doing. When you are stuck in the middle of hard circumstances, it is so easy to feel like you will be stuck there forever!

That’s how I’ve been feeling. It’s been very hard to see past where we are right now. But I know beyond a shadow of doubt our circumstances won’t stay this difficult and this challenging forever.

No season in life lasts forever. Time moves us all along and where we are today is not where we will be a year from now or even 6 months from now.

Sarge is now 12 weeks old! His adjusted age (from his due date) is 8 weeks old. Last night, for the very first time, Sarge slept from 11:30pm to almost 7am! I woke up this morning to his soft cries over the baby monitor, realized it was already light outside and immediately was trying to recall in my mind how the night went. How long was I up for with him? What time did he wake to eat? Suddenly, it dawned on me that he had not woken at all until just before 7am! I jumped out of bed and ran to check on him to make sure all was okay.

I am not getting my hopes up that this will be the norm from here on out. I fully expect more middle of the night feedings to be in my future, but this was a small victory that gives me BIG hope that he is slowly showing improvements.

When I think about his pain level now to eight weeks ago when we arrived home with him, there is definite improvement! There was a time when he would cry in pain through nearly every single bottle. There was a time when he would writh in pain after every single feeding. While he still has times of pain, he also has times of peace! I know, slowly, over time, his times of pain will be taken over by times of peace as his body continues to grow, mature and heal.

Sarge had his appointment with the GI doctor last week on Thursday. I went knowing what the doctor was going to say. I knew he was going to tell me exactly what he told me when I took Sweet Pea three years ago! I wanted to take Sarge so I could know in my mind there was nothing physically wrong with him and, like we had had to do with Sweet Pea, we were just going to have to ride this out with him and give his body time to heal from the drug exposure.

When the GI learned what he had been exposed to he said, “Oh yes, that does a number to a baby’s nervous and digestive system.” And then he told me what I expected to hear: His body needs time to grow, heal and mature. He did say it would not hurt at all to do an ultrasound on Sarge’s abdomen to check him physically. That was my number one concern. Because his pain is so much more intense than Sweet Pea’s pain was and because Sarge had the closed anus at birth, I wanted to know there was not something structurally wrong with Sarge’s digestive system. The GI doctor said that because Sarge is “gaining weight beautifully” (despite the fact he is not yet on the growth chart!) there is almost certainly nothing wrong physically, but we can do the ultrasound anyway. We are also going to send a stool sample for testing to see if there are any abnormalities there.

Beyond that, it is just time. Time is Sarge’s best friend.

I asked for an estimate on how much time before Sarge is more like a “normal baby”. He said to expect things to take longer with Sarge than they did with Sweet Pea simply because Sarge is a boy and boys mature slower than girls. He said by the time Sarge is walking, all of this should be behind us. I think we will see much improvement by the time he is sitting up…which seems light years away.

In all actuality I know it isn’t light years away and instead is months away. We will get there, day by day, week by week, month by month, until one day we will realize “We made it!”.

And then we will be dealing with a baby that gets into everything. I look forward to those days! They will come!

- Elaine