Where is Hayden?

On Thursday evening Hayden was asked to go clean up his room. Now he wasn't feeling the best and had been up since 5 am. Well it was rather quiet downstairs. So I wandered down there and this is how I found Hayden....

Other things that have been going on...

Tanner is home!!!!

He was able to come home Wednesday afternoon. We have been so happy to have him home with us. Hayden has been a big help taking care of him. And any time he is around him he always says 'thats my little brother I like him'. He is too funny. He is a good big brother.







Tanner is still on oxygen. His doctor is hoping we can ween him off of it soon. As for Kevin and I we have said goodbye to restful nights for a while. =)

Welcome to Holland

On Tuesday we were given instructions on how to contact the nursery to check up on Tanner and we had any of our questions answered by the nurses in the nursery. Along with an instruction paper we were given this little story to read:

“Welcome to Holland” by Emily Perl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this…

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!” you say. “What do you mean, Holland?” I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around… and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills… Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

The pain of that will never, ever, go away… because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things… about Holland.




After reading it I felt like this story sums up almost any disappointment we can go through in life. How we expect a certain outcome and are shocked when it doesn't happen that way. It has been like that for me the last week. "Being in Holland" has been a very different and very trying test for Kevin and I. We are very lucky to have the loving and supporting family that we do. Although we did not plan for this situation we will keep with it. And I know that one day we will look back at this and realize that it wasn't so bad and that we have learned a lot from it.

Life throws you curve balls sometimes and you just have to go with it and make it work.

Tanner Emmett Whitmer

Oh what a week it has been.

Last Saturday (April 10th), I had a headache all day. Well normally that is not so bad, but when you have toxemia.... that is never a good sign. And me being me, I down play anything that is wrong with me. I hate being fussed over. And my doctor had told us that anything like a lasting headache, spots, or if I just don't feel right that I needed to go to the hospital immediately. Well I had held off all day thinking it would get better. It didn't, so Kevin finally said come on we are going in. That was about 9 pm.

When we got to the hospital I was admitted and hooked up to some machines to watch Tanner and me. They decided to keep me over night and if my blood tests and blood pressure looked better in the morning then they would send me home. Morning rolled around and we received the news from the nurse that my doctor, who was heading out of town, had come back to induce me. My blood pressure had been all over and my blood test wasn't looking as good as it had in the night.

At 8:00 am my doctor came in and broke my water. I was hooked up to petosin and magnesium sulfate to help my blood pressure and to keep the contractions coming. Around 10 I got the epidural. Kevin loves the needle and things they use for that. My mom came up to be with us during this. Don't know what I would do without the family support that I have from all of my family members. At 11:40 I started pushing. Tanner was really high up still and so he had a bit of moving to do. At 12:04 Tanner came into the world! This labor was much easier than Hayden's was by far. The best part is... that he weighed exactly the same as Hayden, 6 lbs 10 oz and 18 inches long.

After delivery we had Tanner for about an hour and then they sent him to the nursery to check up on him and give him a bath. We didn't even get him back. His oxygen saturation would not stay up and he was breathing to hard and fast. He was put under an oxygen hood to help him keep his oxygen up.



We had a couple visitors during our stay at the hospital, but not as many as with Hayden. It was weird... Also with no baby to take care of the stay at the hospital was very boring. Though the hospital does a nice little dinner for the parents on the night before they are released.



As for Tanner he was then placed on bili lights with oxygen because his biliruben was high. I was released on Tuesday to come home. Tanner is still at the hospital...



While he is now doing better and is off of oxygen, his oxygen level still dips down while he is eating. He was taken off of the bili lights and they retested his blood for his biliruben level. Yesterday we had a little hope that he might come home, but it was dashed when we heard his biliruben number had gone up after being off of the bed. His number had jumped from 12 to 15 to 17. Which put him in the high-risk group. Today he is doing a little better after being under the lights again he is back down to a 15. He failed his carseat and will be retaking that as well. He has to be able to sit in a carseat for 90 minutes with no problems. He will be retested on that and if he fails again we will be given a flat carseat that he gets to go home in when he goes home.



We visit him everyday and all of the nurses at alta view are awesome. We hope to be able to bring him home soon. But for now it is just playing the waiting game. And like everyone keeps reminding me, it is better to have him come home healthy than to have him come home sick.