One Special Kid

When we were expecting Austin, we found out pretty quick he was a mighty special kid.  He had a whole slew of obstacles  to over come even before he made it out of my belly.  The first time we saw a ultra sound of him, we weren't even quite sure what the medical language was they used...Justin was a firefighter instructor at the time and we lived in west Texas.   Rather quickly though we learned about Omphalocele and Gastroscesis.  Thankfully and a bit miraculously, we had the omphalocele to deal with and not the other, much more serious condition of gastroscesis.  His intestines and possibly his liver were stuck in his umbilical cord.  We got into a quick routine of weekend check ups with a specialist in Ft. Worth, we stayed in the same hotel so often the gal at the desk remembered us.  When he was born he was 6 weeks early, emergency C-Section, on a sunny Sabbath morning.  And now, 8 years later he has overcome pneumonias, surgeries, reactive airway disease and heterotaxia syndrome.  He is AMAZING.  Happy Birthday Austin!!

 

 

 

Not only did we have a heck of a party with friends and all the brothers, we had a baptism a couple of months later.  Austin wanted to have grandparents come for his special day and September 16th worked out pretty nicely.  It was also the weekend Justin and Jeremy ran in the Air Force marathon weekend event.  The 5k for Jer and the 1/2 for Justin.

 

 

 

Can you really blame poor Ethan right here?  I bet we took at least 20 pictures and that was just right here in the entry way!  I really love this shot though, getting a candid one like this is pretty sweet.

 

Our "Poppa" came up from Texas for the whole hoopla, we call him poppa because we have multiple grandpas to keep track of.  My dad is Grandpa and we also have a Grandpa Mike, he's married to our Mimi, who also goes by Mammi ( but only to our Texas family), Poppa's wife is Grand Ma Debbie and of course Grandma is my mom.

 

My dad is always like this!  We have words in my family he created that would describe exactly his behavior right here in this picture....boogerhead, snydekki, hawnyauck, to name a few.  My poor mom, she just wants a good shot, she was probably thinking something like "Brent Larsen!" or "For heaven's sake".

 

The reason Austin decided to with crazy eyes I just don't know, but hey, it was his day, we were all just along for the ride.  His road of life has been a bumpy one so far, it seems that we cruise along for awhile and all is well.  Then out of no where, we land in the hospital and a week or two later the docs get things figured out, which also adds another quirk or condition we didn't know he had!