About

My name is Melissa and I am a stay at home mom of four children and I love every chaotic minute of it.  After a few years of what feels like swimming upstream and struggling to catch a breath I thought it might be fun to laugh with others that are in the same boat that I am and slightly out of my “social bubble”. I don’t claim to be any sort of a parenting, homemaking scholar, awesome writer or have a fantasticly, witty personality.   I have thought about writing a book about the drama of everyday life in a house where my four children were all born in less than five years with a wonderful husband that only occasionally is able to make appearances due to the demands of his job, our small business, and his responsibilities within our church because it is something that many can relate to.   Since I haven't taken a writing class in nearly a decade and my attention span seems to shrink with each child that I bring into the world I have decided to stick to blogging.  My posts may range anywhere from everyday family life, drama, to an article, idea, or recipe that I liked to me venting to the world about a random topic.

My first child arrived in 2003.  I started into preterm labor in my 26th week of pregnancy.  Thankfully, through the miracle of modern day medicine and weeks of bedrest the preterm labor was stopped at 26, 28, and 32 weeks.  At 37 weeks I was “released from bondage” and allowed to roam about.  At that point I began  rearranging furniture, jumping on trampolines and  anything else I could think of to convince my little girl to enter the world.  At 39 weeks and 5 days gestation Avery finally decided to make her appearance.

My second  pregnancy was similar, except that the preterm labor started during my 17th week of pregnancy.  In spite of modern medicine and bedrest  my cute, little Madeline was born at 35 weeks with a mind of her own.

Early in 2007 my then three year old daughter announced at church that she was having twin brothers.  I was just fine with the two children that I had and had no intention of having  more, at least not for a while. Because of the challenges during my previous pregnancies  I didn’t have the courage for that just yet.  Well, much to my surprise on Christmas morning my husband and I announced to our children and extended families that we were expecting baby #3.  A couple of months later during my routine twenty week ultrasound we were shocked to discover that we would be having a set of twin boys.  Not just twins, but monoamniotic, monochorionic twins, which made things much more adventurous.  We were told that due to the risk involved with this type of twins and the history of my past pregnancies that our babies only had about a 40% chance of survival and an 80-90% chance of having severe brain damage and being blind and/or deaf.   I was hospitalized at 25 weeks until they were born at 28 weeks. 

Baby A & Baby B became Nicholas and  Hudson, weighing 2 ½ pounds each and only an ounce different.  Nicholas received a blood transfusion and thrived from that point on with his lungs being his only obstacle.  He had pneumonia seven times during the first 17 months of his life and was diagnosed with Asthma.  He already seems to be outgrowing the issues with his lungs.  He has not had pneumonia or even required and inhaler for the past several months.

Hudson has a slight brain bleed that the doctor told us was so small we would never even notice.  During his time in the NICU he didn’t ever catch on to eating.  After doing swallow studies, working with several speech therapists, lactation specialists, on and on and on…I convinced the doctor to let us take him home on an NG tube since he was not making any progress and his brother had been home for over two weeks.   After a series of specialists and therapists we discovered that the hypothalamus was part of the brain that was damaged and was not telling him that he was hungry.  He has also had several other struggles that have been attributes to the brain bleed.  He has yet to start walking, talking, and several other two year old tasks, but he continues to progress and do new things everyday.