Ellie is now 7 lbs 2 oz! It is incredible how much she is growing but it is also fun to have a new born baby for a while! Tomorrow is her month old mark and today is her due date. What is ironic is that when Emma was born, she weighed 7 lbs 2 oz and Ellie is that exact weight today on her due date. So I guess that we can say that she is towing right along with how she should be in a normal situation. It feels good that she is growing so well. We have our first clinic on Tuesday for Ellie in Boise. We will be definitely wiping her out that day. A head ultrasound around 9 am, her hearing test at Elks Re-hab at 10 am, and then her spina bifida clinic at 12:15pm. (This is the big one where she sees multiple doctors in one place...probably between 3 to 4 hours for this appointment.) I think that we will all be exhausted by the time this day is over, but we should have some more information on how Ellie is doing over all and what steps we are taking next with her medical problems. I am actually really excited for the clinic. It will also be nice to get out for a whole day even though it is to Boise again. Earl gets to come with me which is absolutely wonderful. It has been so much easier to go through this with him by my side. I love my wonderful husband! We also took some more photos with our girls on Monday night. She has them posted on her blog too. If you want a peak, it is http://www.katiedallingphotography.blogspot.com/. She spent hours with us at our home and we had a lot of fun trying to keep Ellie happy with pics of her only in her own skin. She was a trooper and Emma was incredible. She hung in there so well! So we now have a lot of photos to choose from. It is really fun having so many pictures! We have never had this before and we are so grateful for them. They are all a priceless treasure that we will forever be grateful for! Hope everyone is doing well! I know that we really need to post some more pics. It is going to happen eventually. Take care. Hope everyone enjoyed the snow we got for a day!

This weekend has been fun and adventurous. We had the opportunity to get pictures done of our family with a friend of ours in our ward. She offered to shoot some pictures and we gladly took her up on it because she is really good! Earl dropped us off at the studio and ran to go get a white shirt for our Eternal family picture. While he was out and about, the transmission went out on the suburban. Yay.... we do have so much to be grateful for but I guess when it rains, it pours. Taking those pics of all of us dressed in white definitely took us away from the temporal things in life and helped us focus on the eternal perspective again, at least for a few minutes until the shoot was over and reality set in. The joys and memories in life that we will hopefully laugh about later! Anyway, our friend put about 8 pictures of our family on her website for anyone to look at. The link to the site is http://setintimephotography.blogspot.com/ if anyone wants to see them. We will also be adding more pics soon. We haven't forgotten. I guess that I am just valuing sleep a little more than anything else whenever I can. I just wanted to thank Bethany for taking a ton of time out of her day to help us get some wonderful pictures of our sweet girls and for waiting so long with me while we waited for Earl to get back with his white shirt. Thank you Bethany. Your time and effort meant so much to us! My parents were able to look at the photos and they loved them. Some of my siblings haven't even been able to meet her yet because of sickness so they really appreciated them!
Things are going well with our sweet Ellie. She is getting closer to approaching 7 lbs now and it is crazy how fast she is gaining. Her eyes are tracking a little better all the time and this week her head rounded out a ton on her sides. Her little head is almost a perfect normal baby's head. I love the precious moments of her smiling while she sleeps and this week she laughed for a few seconds. It was such a fun moment! Emma helps all the time and she is so sweet with her. I got out myself for a time and went grocery shopping last night. It is the strangest thing to see two car seats in the back of our car. I am so grateful that Heavenly Father blessed us with a second child. And especially this little girl. She is perfect just the way she is! Thank you to everyone that has brought is gifts and meals to us. You all have helped us adjust so much easier to our new life. We love all of you!

We are home and doing well. Besides the exhaustion, our little family feels complete! We will try to put more pics up as soon as we can. Between Ellie and Emma we stay really busy. Earl and I made the choice to find our dogs new homes. This was probably one of the best decisions we have ever made. Our home is quiet and peaceful. It is much easier to keep clean and I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that Ellie's incisions are being kept clean no matter where I put her. Thank you so much to all of those who came in and helped so much with getting our home ready for us! There are no words to tell all of you how grateful we are not to be worrying about that in this time of craziness. Ellie has many doctors and they are calling every day for more information and new orders for her care. She has a physical therapist once a week and a nurse that comes in 3 times a week. It is so strange and overwhelming to think that my little baby girl is a part of home health care. It is scary in many ways but it brings me comfort to know that she gets checked on so often. The NICU was a place where my worries were much calmer because of having nurses and machines watching over every part of her constantly. At home, we are now fully responsible and this gets so overwhelming at times. I always thought that I trusted in the Lord completely but have learned from this that I have a ways to go in order to let go and trust in Him. I get so worried that I will not have her for very long and it scares me so much. How grateful I am for a nurse that shares the same religious views as me. It was really good for me to just let my emotions get the better of me and visit with her about our Father in Heaven's plan. None of us ever know when it is our time to go. And if I just let go and let God be in charge (because he is anyway) I will be much more calmer. This is the part where our mortal lives get hard. You just love your family and your children so much that you can't bear to be separated from them for even a time. So my new goal every day as we go through this period is to just enjoy what I have every day and to not think about what the future holds. I have to be grateful for what I have now at this present time. I am so thankful to know that I have a Father in Heaven that loves me and is always watching over me no matter how hard it gets. I am glad to have the blessings of the gospel and the blessings of my husband's priesthood so I know that any of us can get a blessing of comfort whenever it is needed. Angels are watching over us and I hope it continues. Our family will be home bound for a few months. We are not allowed to do much of anything outside our home until this cold and flu season finishes. We will probably bless little Ellie in May if anyone needs to plan to be here ahead of time. Thank you for checking in on our family through the blog. It is incredible to think of the service and love that is out there for our little family. God bless every one of you! Hope all is well!

Ellie's Home!!!

I am sure Earl & Emily will post the details, but me and Debbie (Earl's sisters) got to go to Boise over the weekend and play with Emma until the blessed phone call to pick up Ellie from the hospital!!! We had a great time, and it got better when we reach Twin Falls and actually got to hold Ellie! She is even more beautiful than the pictures!!!
Here are a few pics from our trip:

Aunts Becky & Debbie enjoying Emma & Ellie.Ellie grabbed Emma's finger.
Two very tired cousins finally reaching Twin Falls from Boise.
Because they went wild in the hotel room, loved jumping back and forth between the beds and running from one end of the room to the other screamin. This is a cookie and movie break.
....after spending an hour or so at the pool!

Today's Progress

Today has been a pretty overwhelming day. Ellie is doing wonderful and therefore it is almost time to go home...YAY!...WOW!...SCARY!...EMOTIONAL ROLLER COASTER!...CAN WE REALLY DO THIS?...ARE YOU SURE SHE IS REALLY READY?...WE CAN'T WAIT TO COME HOME! So those are only a few of the emotions and thoughts we have had going through our heads in the last 24 hours. Ellie passed her car seat test with flying colors. She is also eating 2 oz every 3 to 4 hours so I can't imagine her not gaining weight with that appetite. Ellie has a really different personality than Emma did when she was a baby. Emma was so passive and didn't care much when we changed her diaper or how long it would take to get her fed. Ellie is absolutely opposite. She goes from zero to sixty in about 2 seconds! Her lungs are very well developed. You should hear her scream. It is absolutely nuts. This could take some getting used to. But with it all said, she is a keeper. Although we are going home soon, we will be keeping the blog going after getting home too. Ellie will not be allowed too many visitors throughout RSV season. So please call before coming. We have to take many precautions before allowing anyone to come in. We have been organizing her home care and Doctor appointments. This is an incredible feet in itself! We are preparing as much as possible and we are so grateful for our wonderful blessing that has come into our lives! Thanks everyone for your prayers and support and help! We could not have gone through this hospital stay witbout you! We know that our journey with this little one is only beginning and how grateful we are for eternal families! We will try to keep everyone posted as time goes. These next 2 days could be very busy. We will be putting new pics up too. One last request for all of you...Please add all of the other babies and families and parents that are in the NICU dealing with such incredible issues to your prayers. Some are progrssing slowly...some are getting better faster than others and some are going home to Him before all of us. This has been such an emotional time for so many here. Please say an extra prayer for those that we are leaving behind. We love you all!

Eating Progess

For babies to leave the NICU they have to meet 3 requirements which include: maintaining their own temperature, gaining weight, and taking in all food by mouth. Thus far Ellie has conquered keeping temperature and gaining weight so is just lacking the food intake. We have ventured to give her bottles and she likes those quite a bit. She has to intake full doses of her food by mouth for 24 hours which started at 10:00pm last night so that process has started. Emily has noticed that Ellie has been waking up 30 min before her feeding time ready to eat. One final test is the car seat test which is placing her in the car seat for 4 hrs and checking to see if her heart and respritory rate drop in that time period.

New Pictures

Ellie is a sucker for a binki. The binki has been helping her become stronger in sucking so her feedings will go better. It also is very good for her in particular because it helps her relax and stay calm while being stimulated.

We finally caught someone while they were wide awake this morning, so we took the opportunity to take some pictures. Even after taking this picture, her eyes have become more and more focused on things and it is so much fun to just sit and rock her back and forth while she stares into mom and dad's eyes.

Silly Expressions turn out to be factual...

Earl and I found out that some silly expressions people use to describe a behavioral moment they may have can actually be known as a medical condition. Our poor little Ellie is tounge-tied...literally. So everyone has a string-like cartilidge that runs from your bottom back area of your mouth underneath your toungue and it should run to the back area of the bottom of your toungue. Well Ellie has been trying really hard to nurse. She has been pretty successful a few times but she really gets frustrated with it and tuckers out pretty fast. We figured that she just needed more time to get used to it because of her prematurity. Well there is probably some truth in that, but our physical therapist also discovered that Ellie's toungue is being held down a bit (or a lot!) because her cartilidge runs from the back bottom area of her mouth almost to the tip frontal area of her toungue. No wonder she is struggling and frustrated with nursing. And the medical term for it is toungue-tied. This turns out to be more common than we know. In fact it may be genetic because one of Earl's sisters had it when she was small. Although, Ellie's is so bad that it affects how she eats and it will definitely intervene with her speech later on. Wow! The poor girl can't even put her toungue up to the top of her roof of her mouth. We also found out that she has no gag reflex. We will have to see what the NICU docs decide to do with these issues. Atleast we know that they should be able to surgically fix the toungue-tied problem since it has been pretty common for years. We shall see what happens there.
Sorry we have not posted any more info for a few days. It has been a crazy week so far. Ellie has graduated from an enclosed Giraffe bed to an open crib(or bassinet). She is now able to wear clothes and so far is keeping her body temp up on her own. Once in a while her temp is a tid-bit low but nothing an extra blanket can't fix. The nurse gave her a bottle of my milk for the first time last night and she did rather well with it. She is now up to full feeds (We will see how she handles it) and she is no longer on an I.V. She has made some incredible steps to getting her closer to go home. In fact, the only thing left for her to do is taking all of her food in orally. The only problem with that is it sometimes takes the longest to get there. So we are still not sure when we will be home but we are much closer than we were last week and that is a blessing. She is now laying flat on her back and her head is getting a little more round and normal looking all the time. Ellie is incredible. We will try to have some new pics up later today. Thanks again for all the prayers. We are truly feeling all your love and support! Thanks again for all of that! I hope that you are all doing well.
Signing out!
Emily and Earl