What We Have Found Out

Ok....Hudson had his EEG which was an experience in itself....one word..HORRIBLE....but we wont dwell on that. We just meet with the consulting neurology team and heard what we hoped we WOULDN'T hear. Hudson's EEG was abnormal with his seizure occurring in the back right lobe of his brain, meaning a "focal" seizure. Generalized seizures are the more common and less severe seizures but his was not. Typically a child isn't started on meds after their first seizure but due to it being a focal seizure, the length, and the fact that it will probably occur again they wanted him started right away. They are releasing us but we will need to find a neurologist in Dallas and get an MRI done. The main danger in his type of seizure is the length..anything over 5 minutes gets dangerous and again, his was probably over an hour. They are also sending us home with an emergency med in case he has another one on the road to be administered. If it stops in 3-5 minutes we can continue but if not it will require the ER.

SO, I know you will continue to pray for us as we travel. We have about another 8 hours on the road. The kids have been SO great but are disappointed over their New Years Eve plans. We plan on getting the girls to Dallas to meet up with their Youth Group for the NY's Eve blowout, Jordan is still undecided...we all are gross....I am covered in puke and pee but it is so worth it having Hudson back to his normal funny self and we will ring in the New Year SO VERY GRATEFUL for this boy.

Hudson was scheduled for surgery the 18th to remove very large tonsils. He has never been sick but his next palate surgery is his p-flap and is tonsils are so large they will obstruct this next phase of surgery which is crucial to his speech. He then has to wait 5-6 months after his tonsil surgery to do his p-flap and we so pray this won't interrupt all of that. I guess we will find all of that out in the next couple weeks as we add yet another specialist to our growing list. Again, we are not complaining. We are so blessed by Hudson and know God sees all that lays ahead of us, we trust in Him!!!

UPDATE

Dear Friends....First,,,THANK YOU for your prayers!!!! We have needed them and felt them. SECOND....Hudson has finally come around and seems to be fine. I will re-cap on what happened.

We typically drive straight thru from MN to TX but were not in a hurry and decided to spend the night in Kansas City and take the kids out for a nice dinner on the Plaza. We loaded up and left the hotel about 8:30 this morning. Hudson was fine, talking, laughing, etc but a bit cranky...nothing unusual as he had been up late the night before. I did think he looked really pale but.....not much thought to it. He was asleep within minutes. About 30 minutes down the road we stopped at a drive thru for breakfast. He didn't wake up, again, no big deal...Jordan and Madi were both sleeping too. About 10 minutes later back on the road I heard him moving and turned to check on him. He was turned to his left and appeared to be straining to see out the back side window...I said "Hud, what are you looking at"...he didn't respond, just kept staring out the window....Kailee then asked him if he wanted some hot chocolate and he shook his head "no"...he did have a sort of blank look on his face but again....Looking back on all of it now I KNOW he was starting to have his seizure then...

SO.. about 40 minutes down the road I turned to look at him (he was in his car seat between the girls). IMMEDIATELY I knew something was wrong....he had a strange fixed gaze at the ceiling in the car, he was a sort of green/yellowish color, his head had a strange tilt to the left and he wouldn't respond to me....I said "Something is wrong with Hudson" and Kailee and I quickly traded places. I yanked him out of car seat and he was limp and lifeless. His eyes were open but his eyeballs were fixed to the far left of his eyes and he would not respond AT ALL...I really think he wasn't breathing at the moment. As soon as I picked him up a large amount of foam spilled out of his mouth. I couldn't find a pulse and for a few minutes honestly thought "he is gone"...a hundred thoughts went thru my head but one that stands out to me was saying to my mom..."No mom....you can't be with him yet"...weird thought but that was what I thought...We were on the phone with 911.....we had NO idea where we were, what to do, who could help. The 911 dispatcher had us exit the next exit and sent an ambulance.....it was 15 minutes away.....SOO..here we were, in the middle of MO, at a gas station, I had Hudson outside walking with him in the parking lot hoping the cold would get him to come around a bit, the girls were sobbing, Jordan was praying, Mark was crying, praying......I KNEW I needed people to pray so handed him to Mark so I could call Pam....she didn't answer so I called my friend Jeni to get the prayers going.....no details, there were none to give, "just please pray".... a few very kind but very hick first responders got there and they looked like heavenly angels....at least someone was there to give him CPR if he needed it, I just didn't think I could. FINALLY the ambulance arrived and we headed back north 15 minutes to a little hospital. STILL no response, fixed eyes and stiff neck, all to the left....... It wasn't until we were in the hospital and they gave him something to pull him out of the seizure did he relax and fall asleep.

We are now at Children's Mercy in Kansas City, MO., transferred by ambulance. He just woke up in about the last hour, was hungry and is happy Hudson. What we know...CT scan is normal, chest x-ray is normal, blood work normal, good vitals. What we don't know...why?? The dr. talked at length with us.....lots of kids have seizures, lots of times they don't know why. When a seizure is short and just once they typically don't do much. They are a bit more concerned with Hudson for a few reasons...his seizure was really long, about an hour, or was a series of several, he had to be pulled out of it, and his Cleft......The neurologist wants to do an EEG in the am and really evaluate him as the Avatar/atavan (sp?) can hide symptoms. Mark's sister Tanya and her husband are on their way and they have a Ronald McDonald house where Mark and the kids can stay.

Seriously, five minutes before I turned to look at Hudson I was telling Mark how much I was looking forward to getting home and getting back to "normal" after our year. We are truly so grateful for the care that has been given to Hudson today.... After 17 1/2 years of parenting, this has been by far the scariest. The kids have been wonderful, they were all so scared and we couldn't really tend to them as we were consumed with Hudson. They sure love their little brother!!!

THANKS to all of you for your comments, emails, fb messages, and texts...We pray that all tests come back normal, this was a freak one time episode, and we can get home tomorrow.....

I'll keep you updated my friends!!!!

Prayer for Hudson!

Hey Ya'll,

This is Pam posting for Sharon. Please pray for Hudson. This morning on their way home from Minnesota, Hudson had a seizure. They called an ambulance from the side of the road. They were in Kansas City. He was unresponsive for awhile, so they medicated him to get him to come out of it. He is now being transferred to Children's Hospital in Kansas City. His CT Scan has come back normal. He has never shown any signs of seizures or anything. Please pray for the entire family....It is so hard to watch your child go through this. Lift them up in Prayer. Sharon or I will update you as soon as possible.

Thank you!

Christmas Morning

drinking out of the same Santa cup I did when I was little

big brother putting together toys

loving Thomas!

Christmas Eve

A little hot tubing before dinner

the challenge to run out in the snow (cousin Jack fell in the snow behind Grandpa)

Sharing the love..

Looking for Santa (which we have never done but certian family members do...)

Just happy to be here!!!

Merry Christmas Eve from snowy Minnesota!!!!

wordless wednesday

"I can do no big things, only small things in loving ways"

My mom's heated bird bath outside her living room window.

Today is one month since my mom left this earth. Although I rejoice daily that she is completely healed and marvel in awe as I never have before at what she is experiencing I still wake up on Saturdays thinking "I can't wait to talk to mom" or many times during the week reach for the phone to call and tell her some cute thing Hudson has said or ask her a question...like "how do you make your roast beef gravy?" as I did today.

I am still processing all that transpired during the last week I spent with her. It was the most difficult, exhausting, emotional, thing I have ever done but in the midst of that week and the week that followed one of the most spiritually rich and humbling events that I have ever experienced. I am writing this more for myself than anyone else as I have tried to grasp the magnitude of it all so I am just going to write my thoughts and if it begins to ramble forgive me.

Let me go back to when I was little. My mom was a city girl, graduating from the U of M with a nursing degree and married my dad, a small town Navy boy with no HS diploma but a huge work ethic. When I was four he moved us to a run down farm on 80 acres. He was a farrier and spent his days with horses, making their shoes and trimming their hooves. As long as I can remember mom worked full time, all year round. I hated coming home to an empty house and swore I would always stay home with my kids whatever it took. She spent most of her nursing career as a mental health nurse in a State Hospital. She took this state job because of the pay and benefits as they were raising a family of six. My dads work was not steady and farming as we know is usually a struggle so she was the steady bread winner. Although she worked full time she always made us home cooked dinners..every night. Eventually my dad got the farm cleaned up and in working order and began to work it and taught us all a strong work ethic as we bailed hay, picked rocks out of the fields, weeded our large garden, pumped water for our horses and cows by hand TWICE a day, along with all of the other lovely chores that come with living on a farm. Our summers of camping trips in Northern MN were replaced with at least half a day of hard work before fun could be had. Since I have become an adult I have come to cherish my childhood much more than I did as a child. I LOVED horses and would spend hours riding by myself through our woods and pastures. I was not raised in a religious home. In fact, neither of my parents were raised in church and decided to go to church when they began their family. They were Lutheran and church was what we did on Sundays..thats it. But, in those quiet hours of horseback riding I believe the Lord began to speak to my heart and I longed to know Him more. I would take my bible out to a favorite place in the woods and sit on a big rock and read. I was inspired by Joni Erickson, Anne Frank and Jim Elliott. I longed to sit in deep studies and worship with something other than hymms and recited prayers. The Lord was SO faithful to me and began to bring people in my life who discipled me and spent hours with my friends and I feeding us "meat" and challenging us spiritually. As I neared graduation from high school and then went on to college my spiritual ego became quite large and now I am ashamed to admit it I just knew I was better than my parents in that department. I would spend hours educating them on how they needed to change and pursue God. Although my mom was a hard worker I saw her as weak because she was a worrier. I wondered why she wasn't more outspoken. As life does, we had some curve balls thrown at us as a family and I slowly began to see my parents lean on their church and their faith. My mom became extremely active in her country church and in her years of retirement began a Parish Nurse program there. I believe it was there that she found her true calling and found such joy in serving. I am so grateful she spent her final years using her love for nursing in a way that brought peace and comfort to so many. Mom and I had many good conversations last year when I lived up there about sharing our faith. As I mentioned before we were doing the Esther study together and she would often tell me how she wished she could share her faith more...like I did.... One night we watched Faith Like Potatoes (GREAT movie) and afterwards it led to a deep conversation about how the main character in the movie was so confident in sharing his faith and my mom couldn't understand that. She felt like she just couldn't be comfortable doing what he did. BUT.....there was not a morning that I did not get up last year (or many years before that when she would visit me or I would visit her) that I did not find her reading her bible in the morning and journaling before she went to bed at night.

Fast forward to 1 month ago.....I did not watch a weak woman struggle and wither down to skin and bones for 7 days before she took her final earthly breath. I watched and was HONORED to serve one of the strongest most confident woman I know I will ever meet. In those last days we began to read through her journals and discovered how much pain she lived with, especially in her last two months. We had no idea how sick she was as she wasn't about to let on to us how she couldn't eat and how much pain racked her body 24/7. We also read how daily she would write down things she was grateful for....her husband, watching the birds outside, working in her garden, her grandkids coming over. Even on those days when dr.'s gave her discouraging reports or when she had been sick without us knowing she was grateful for something.

By the steady stream of visitors in her final days and the day of her visitation we began to get a sense of how many people she touched. For over three hours there was a mass of people telling us how much she had meant to them, or how she had prayed for them or a sick family member on one of her visits. Friends from nursing school came (who she did a yearly reunion with), people she worked with 30 years ago, young and old. One was a young mom in her church. She has a daughter who was born with down syndrome a few years ago. She cried and cried telling my dad how my mom was the only one would hold her baby when she was born and would just ooh and ahh over her. The following day people were filling the church before we even arrived. The sanctuary was packed and not everyone was even fitting in the over flo fellowship hall. Again, for hours we heard family members, friends, strangers share something unknown about my mom to us. And then the cards.....I am STILL sending thank you notes to the hundreds of cards that came in....most with some kind of note again, sharing such HUMBLING words to me about this woman MY MOM who I now know was who Jesus tells us all to be. Almost every card or every person mentioned her faith, what an example she was to them, how much she taught them. She was His hands and feet, never holding back food to the hungry, water to the thirsty. I said earlier I was not raised in a religious home and growing up I would say I wasn't raised in a Christian home. Oh, how untrue.........

....yes, we are so different. She was a worrier, I am not. I am outspoken, she was not. I wear my heart on my sleeve, she wore hers so humbly, never thinking she was doing enough, or good enough, or faithful enough. In some of funeral notes she had written down a quote by Mother Theresa "I can do no big things, only small things in loving ways".......And I have not a doubt that when she stood before Him, HEALED & RESTORED I know He said "WELL DONE GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT"......that I could live so well!!!!!

So mom, you have taught me more about who Jesus desires us to be than I ever thought possible. You LIVED it. I have gone on many a mission trip.....you, not one....but your life was one big mission trip. You just served as you lived, you lived as you served.....which comes first??? I now know the strength you were made of. I miss you, I would love to hear your voice, your laugh.....see you in the kitchen when we arrive next Saturday with the smell of your chocolate sauce on the stove and popcorn popping. But instead I will smile as i picture you before His throne, walking among His streets, His gardens......and I will strive to live as you lived although I will never live as well.........

THANKSGIVING 2009

Every other year we do the holidays between Texas and Minnesota. It is a Minnesota Christmas this year so that means a Texas Thanksgiving. We left Mn at 7 pm the Saturday before Thanksgiving (a 17 hr drive) and I was in Central Texas Monday morning with Hudson. I went early to plan a baby shower for Crystal the Saturday after Thanksgiving...we like to have our holidays as crazy as possible...???...This year we had almost 60 people the day of Thanksgiving. Mark has 5 siblings so all six of them with kids is quite a bunch already and we stay all week at his moms house. We were joined on Thanksgiving by some extended family and good friends. The weather was perfect which was very needed. As insane as it was we did have a good week and I am truly Thankful for my family both in MN and TX.....

We have mostly older kids now but we love that these four have each other. Cole and Gracie will be four soon and Sophie is 2.

Make sure you see ALL of the Thanksiving fun!!!

...FINALLY..the alaskans!!!

Mark's brother David moved to Alaska three years ago to become a family with Crystal and Alyssa. Although Mark and I flew to Alaska in March of 07 for their wedding the rest of the family has not seen him in three years. We had such a great week with them and were so sad to see them leave. David had never met Hudson and we have all always said how alike they are in personality and looks. Hudson ADORED him and I think David felt the same way. We are so excited about their baby due in June..FINALLY another asian in the family!!!! Alyssa
Crystal and Nicole

David catching up with our other Thanksgiving guests from Ireland.

WE LOVE YOU TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

...thanksgiving in central Texas...

...a little shooting...

...a little walking...
...a little brotherly love...
...a little laughing...
...a little watching...
...a little football...

LOTS of fun!!!!

....family quest 09 grand finale...

Since Uncle David was here for the first time in 3 years "family quest" resumed. He started this several years ago and puts all the cousins in four teams, the oldest four being the team leaders. We LOVE that these four (two college and two Jr.'s) are good sports and play along all day, it becomes an all day event, leading their teams of younger cousins. This was 'identify the state quarter in your bowl of pudding using only your mouth'.

The head attire is signifying each team...three of the four head dresses are pictured below on the girls.

...our own A&M bonfire..

cousins kailee, whitley, kelly, madi, hannah
"sisters" sharon, chrystal, nicole, tanya, stacey, erika (shonda and sarah where are you?)

...."Family Quest"...team members

Three of the four "teams"...gracie was just being cute!!!!