Eyes and ears

Our two hospital appointments this week have gone quite well.  Jessica had an eye test on Monday which has showed that she is slightly long-sighted, which may be what is causing the squint and hopefully this can be corrected with glasses when Jessica is a little older.  The other possible cause is a muscle weakness in the eye, which would normally require surgery – at present this can’t be completely ruled out particularly as there is a strong family history (both Daddy and Grandma have needed eye surgery for a squint) but hopefully this is not the case with Jessica. 

On Wednesday, Jessica had an audiology follow-up and she has now been discharged from the audiology clinic as there are no longer any concerns with her hearing and the fluid in her middle ear has gone so that was very good news.

We are off to Southampton tomorrow ready for another cardiac catheter procedure on Tuesday – hopefully all will go well with this but we would be very grateful for any prayers regarding this!   We will update again after this procedure and let you know how Jessica gets on.

Development and hospital dates

Jessica has now started to bum-shuffle backwards and is getting quite good at making her way across the floor when she wants to now (and we are starting to discover quite how un-babyproof our living room still is!) She is also now able to pull herself upwards into a sitting position from lying down. She now weighs in at 7645g (16lb 13oz) and is starting to get in to the 6-9 month clothes.

Once again it has been a sociable couple of weeks in the life of Jessica – we have been to visit our friends Emma & James; Jessica met our friends Vicky and Sean and their family for the first time; visited a couple more gold postboxes; we went to our friends Jamie and Mat’s civil partnership last weekend and then this weekend, Jessica helped Uncle Adrian celebrate his 50th birthday. We are blessed with a very sociable baby – she loves watching people and is quite content to be passed around for cuddles!

We have now been given a date for the cardiac catheter procedure – we will be going into Southampton next Monday (1st October) ready for the procedure to take place on 2nd October. This will be measuring the pressure in the blood vessels around Jessica’s heart – hopefully the results will continue to show that Jessica is doing well. Her oxygen saturation levels are still looking good and staying in the mid 80s.

We also have a couple more hospital appointments over the next week – an ophthalmology appointment to review her squint and an audiology follow-up to re-test Jessica’s hearing (last time there was fluid in the ear and she wasn’t responding to lower-frequency sounds). Please could you keep our little girl in your thoughts and prayers over the next week or so as we make our various trips to different hospitals. We will let you know how she gets on with them all.

Jessica's 1st birthday party

Jessica’s birthday celebrations have continued over into the weekend and finished with a big party for her this afternoon.  It has been wonderful to be able to celebrate reaching this milestone with so many family and friends who have supported us and Jessica throughout her journey.  

Jessica has had a lovely day celebrating her birthday with everyone and seemed to thoroughly enjoy all the attention and cuddles.  She was just a bundle of smiles from the moment she woke from her nap to discover she was in the middle of a party right up until the last of the party guests left.

Thank you so much to everyone who came along today and helped make our little girl’s birthday party such a special event.

Jessica - the first year

Back in December, we gave a brief summary of Jessica’s first 100 days in numbers.  Now that she is a year old, we thought it was time to do it again!

Days spent in hospital: 91

Surgical procedures (after birth): 4 plus 2 cardiac catheter investigations

Hospital appointments: 18

Different hospitals visited: 5

Blog entries since birth (not including this one): 102

Blog pageviews since birth: 32,464

Weight gained since birth: 4930g (10lb 13oz)

Length increase: 20.5cm

Number of teeth: 2

Words in vocabulary: 4

Christenings attended: 1 (her own!)

Weddings attended: 5

Funerals attended: 4

Olympic postboxes visited: 26

Paralympic postboxes visited: 3

Weeks tube-fed: 12

Weeks breast-fed: 40

Precious moments: So many more than we ever dreamed possible

 What an amazing year it has been for us all – a bit of a rollercoaster ride at times, but our beautiful little girl has brought us so much joy in this past year that it really has been the best year of our lives.

Happy 1st birthday, Jessica!

Today is our little miracle’s first birthday and words just can’t describe how amazing it is to have got here and to have had such a wonderful day with our beautiful Jessica.  She seems to have really enjoyed being a birthday girl today and has had a lovely day with visits from Great-Auntie Marls, Grandma, Grandad, Nanny, Auntie Loraynne, Auntie Twinny and cousins Ebony and Erin.  She also went to 'Stay, Play and Learn' and was quite delighted when everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her!

 Needless to say, she has been thoroughly spoilt today – lots and lots of cards and presents, hugs and kisses and attention from everyone.  She has had some wonderful presents and has really enjoyed playing with her new toys. 

It is amazing to see how happy and healthy she looks after everything she has been through in the past year – watching her grow and develop into the little girl she is today has brought us so much joy in spite of all the dark and difficult moments on this journey.  Getting to her first birthday really is such a huge milestone for us all, and we are so grateful to all the medical staff and all the love, thoughts and prayers that have been behind us – everything that has helped Jessica get to this stage on her journey.  It has been a wonderful year in so many ways – we are so incredibly blessed with this beautiful little girl in our lives – God has been truly amazing to us all and we have had such wonderful support from so many people throughout.  Thank you all for all your lovely birthday wishes for our little girl today.

Jessica journeys around the country

It has been a busy couple of weeks for Jessica as she has been away enjoying her first holiday and travelling all over the country.   Over the past two weeks, we have travelled nearly 1800 miles in our journey around Great Britain as we decided to take up goddaddy Bryan’s challenge to visit all the Olympic golden postboxes (provided Jessica coped well with the travelling!)

We started off our holiday with a brief stay in Keighley in Yorkshire to help celebrate our friends Mark and Ria’s wedding where a few of our friends got to meet Jessica for the first time. 

A couple of days later, we were off to Sunderland as Michael was working at a family fun day and Jessica enjoyed having a go at GT5 and racing a car around a virtual track (assisted by Daddy and later by Mummy).  

After Sunderland, Jessica left England for the first time as we headed north into bonnie Scotland (or more accurately, very wet and windy Scotland!) and Edinburgh.  Thankfully the sun came out for our day trip to Edinburgh Zoo where Jessica got to see giant pandas, koalas, and penguins, not to mention lions and tigers and bears (oh my!).  

We then continued further north to Aberdeen and Lossiemouth where we were treated to a fantastic display of fast jet training by the Tornado GR4 squadron at RAF Lossiemouth. We then  made our way back south again to Glasgow via Dunblane (where we experienced flash floods) and we had a lovely couple of days staying with godmummy Gillian.

The last few days of our holiday were spent taking a somewhat interesting route back home via Bolton and Manchester, north-east Wales, the Peak District and Towcester, where our friends Chris and Emma got to catch up with Jessica.

So far we have been to 26 out of 57 Olympic postboxes and 2 of the Paralympic ones – whether we’ll manage them all remains to be seen!  Jessica has coped amazingly well with all the travelling – she has generally been very happy throughout it all, particularly when one of us sits with her in the back of the car to keep her entertained.  It has also been lovely to spend such a long period of time together as a family – this is the first time we have spent so long together outside of hospital and it has been wonderful.   

Jessica is becoming increasingly chatty now and has started ‘singing’ as well – which is delightful to hear, although we were not sure other people shared this view when Jessica decided to sing at the top of her voice in our hotel room one night at 11.30pm!  We are also seeing more and more different facial expressions – mostly very cheeky-looking ones!  She will now put her feet down and try to hold her weight when being held in a standing position and has just started to work out how to pull herself into a sitting position from lying down.