ABOUT MINA:

Mina is a precious little girl recently rescued from an orphanage in Eastern Europe who is now finally home with her forever family! She had been without a mother or father to love her & care for her each day. No one to rock her, kiss her gently or tell her she's loved. She is blessed with an extra chromosome known as Down syndrome, which for her that meant a life of being viewed as worthless in the country she was born into & a life without hope. Because of this her parents gave her up at the age of 6 months when they found out the diagnosis & from there her life progressivly went down hill. We are the Gower family residing in OKC who recently adopted this little angel. She was extremely malnourished and unable to do just about anything when we first met her. She will be 2 in January & is the size of a 3-6 month old weighing 14lbs. She continues to amaze us at how quickly she is progressing with love and nutrition. She has learned to sit up, roll over, feed herself finger foods, hold her own bottle and loves to interact with toys and other children. Her life has changed so much in such a short period of time and will forever be changed! Thank you Lord for putting a burden on our hearts to rescue this little blessing and making her apart of our family!

Saturday, January 29, 2011

WE'RE ALIVE!!! :)

So most of you probably think we fell off the face of the earth the past couple months… which as far as blogging goes we absolutely did….. but we are still here alive and well :)


At last a moment to sit down and update the world on the couple months of life. ha ha Sorry to those of you who have been wondering or wanting an update on Mina. Life has definitely thrown us a curve ball and been extremely crazy and stressful the past couple months.

Starting the end of November my husband (Jim) has had a whirlwind of scary situations starting with a tree limb going into his right eye. He was in severe pain and the eye got infected and he still hasn’t fully regained his vision. So he was down for about a week spending most his time in bed on pain meds. After he got over that eye infection his left eye ended up looking like he had pink eye in it (although I don’t think that’s what it was.) That eye was infected and gooped up for several days and then all of a sudden his eye cleared up but he had swollen lymph nodes in front of his ear and all along the left area of his face. Then we noticed a patch break out on his forehead that looked like acne. He was in terrible pain so we took him to the doctor on a Friday and they put him on bactrim (antibiotic) for a skin infection and sinus infection. After being on it for 24 hours the spot continued to get much worse and spread on his face and the pain got so bad that by 1 in the morning he was pacing the floor and grabbing his head (after taking pain meds.) The medicine wasn’t helping at all so we took him into the ER. The ER doc came in took one look at him and said he had shingles and the antibiotic wouldn’t help so he took him off that and prescribed him antiviral medicine. He was in bed sleeping for over a week trying to recover and drugged up. I have never seen him in so much pain. I guess from all the many things that have happened and all the meds he had been taking for pain & eye infections, etc his immune system was really weak and so at that point he got shingles. We had to take him to several eye doctors appointments to continue to check to make sure the infection didn’t spread to his cornea because if it spread it could cause blindness and the shingles were already covering his eye lid. So it seemed for a few weeks we were in and out of doctors offices. I have been trying to get his immune system boosted with vitamins, D3, kefir, olive leaf, colloidal silver, and fresh vegetable juices. I also rotated rubbing aloe vera, colloidal silver, and apple cider vinegar on the spots on his face. The ACV seems to have helped a tremendous amount in drying it up. Well thankfully Jim is feeling much better now!! Praise the Lord!!!! He has scaring along his forehead now but hopefully that will minimize some with time.

So in the midst of all of that going on my grandma was in the hospital and we found out that she has lung cancer in the final stage and there’s not much they can do for her. They said she has about a year…. But I’m praying for a miracle. My grandma is one of Mina’s biggest fans and hugest supporters in bringing Mina home. She was always there at every event and fundraiser and always telling everyone about her precious new great grandbaby she looked forward to meeting and she absolutely adores her. She prayed and prayed for Mina everyday while we were in the process of adopting her and did everything she could to help get her home. We are so grateful for all of her help, love and support and that she helped save the precious life of our precious baby girl. Everyone please Please lift up prayers for my grandma that her year would turn into decades and that God would give her ultimate healing only He can.

So next curve ball was despite the fact I tried to keep the girls away from Jim and he basically stayed secluded to our bedroom while he had the shingles about the time he was getting better Mina broke out with the chicken pox and then a week or so after that Myla got the chicken pox. Both the girls had the chicken pox during Christmas and we basically spent the entire month of December cooped up in our house. Mina got a more mild case of it but poor Myla was covered and it lasted almost 3 weeks. After we thought it was about over and she hadn’t broken out with anymore spots for a few days she all of a sudden developed what looked like a terrible rash all over her body. We took her into the doctor and they said that it was more chicken pox coming up all over. My poor girl… I felt so bad for her. Needless to say we spent lots of time rocking and snuggling.

Once everyone was over that and we were finally free to get out of our house Jim got sick with the flu and then the rest of us followed. Let me just tell ya… being 9 months pregnant, extremely sick and trying to take care of your whole family that is sick is a tough job. Mina and Myla had fevers that got up to 104 and those poor babies wanted nothing more than just being snuggled so we spent over a week once again on house arrest resting as a family.

I never really could find the perfect opportunity to sit down and write because between caring for everyone in my family I was worn out any moment I would get to actually just sit and rest. Thankfully we are all better at this point and hopefully it will stay that way for quite some time.

I only have 3 weeks left till this baby is born and so I hope to get our blog updated with some pics for you all of the last couple months.

Mina is doing wonderful!! She is getting all over the place by crawling, scooting on her bottom, rolling, whatever she has to do….. she is a completely mobile child now and makes it all over the house. She is such a happy precious little girl and loves to giggle and smile all the time. We have been working with her on standing up and she will do it for a minute or so with you holding on to her (only when she wants to.) She is sleeping great through the night; eats great and everything in site LOL; saying a few words and working on sign language. We just celebrated her 2nd Birthday!

Keep an eye out for pics and posts from the past couple months. I plan to post back so that you all can see the changes in our precious girl during this time.

3 comments:

Aspiring Foster Mama said...

Oh honey - you have had such a tough time!! You are so strong, I think I would have cracked had I been dealt all you have these past few months. Praying for continued health! You're such a good mama and wife. Glad the ACV is helping - it really helped w/ seth's eczema.

Liz said...

aww! thanks for the update! you guys have been through the ringer :(
i wish we could have met up. next time we are in OKC, we will be giving you a ring though. i will be praying for the safe arrival of your newest precious baby!

csmith said...

Oh, my goodness what a lot to have going on at one time! You have all of my sympathy. When I was eight months pregnant all of my kids plus the two I babysat all came down with chicken pox, and not all at once but one after another. We had kids in the house with chicken pox for eight weeks. The whole time is just one big blur of exhaustion. I'm glad that you're back though, I have loved hearing about your girls since the first time I read your blog. Do you know if you're having a girl or boy, I can't remember if you've mentioned?