Patching and a few other things

Today I had a really nice day. Xavier and I went for a trip to a shopping centre that is about an hour's drive away. I had never been there before so it was fun to go somewhere different. The reason we went there is because a while ago when Xavier got his glasses I promised him that because he was being so good with them (he really is a gem and rarely takes them off!) that I would take him to the shopping centre and buy him a Humpty Dumpty stuffed toy. I had seen them before and at his gymbaroo classes he has learnt the song. Although of course he is too young to actually sing it, he does recognise it and can do actions to it. So I thought he would like having his own Humpty. Though I know he probably had no idea what I had promised him, I did promise it and wanted to get him the toy. But after seeing them everywhere, as soon as I wanted to buy one every store had suddenly sold out! That's why we ended up driving an hour to a shopping centre that had one in stock. But it was well worth it because we ended up bringing a Humpty home with us, and Xavier absolutely loves him.

Because Joel was working, we then ended up spending the rest of the day at my Mum and Dad's. There is a cot there for Xavier so he is all set when we go there. It is good company for me when Joel has a long work day. My mum is always really helpful and usually offers us to stay for dinner and then sends us home with a dinner for Joel so I don't have to cook, as well as a dinner to put in the freezer for Xavier for another day. That is exactly what happened today - Mum had made a shephard's pie and it was so delicious! Xavier loved it too and I am sure Joel will enjoy it when he gets home tonight.

Speaking of Joel, listen to what my beautiful husband did on Friday for me: I went to work and halfway through the day I get a phone call from reception asking me to come over and collect something that is at the front desk for me. I went downstairs wondering what it could be. When I got there I see a big arrangement of orange roses (my favourite colour flower is orange) with a teddy bear and a card. On the card is written "Roses are red, violets are blue, we met seven years ago today, and I still love you. Yours, Joel" I was blown away by his thoughtfulness and I really had to fight back some tears. It was a beautiful gesture. I have been a bit stressed out lately with Xavier's eye problems, as well as my friend being sick (I mentioned that a while ago you might remember? While she is doing better she still needs lots of support and it is stressful sometimes). Also I have really missed Joel as he has been working so hard getting the business up and running (you might remember he changed careers recently and that is all going fantastic as well, just obviously requires him to put in a lot of hours away from us.) I felt so blessed to have such a beautiful husband. Thankyou God.

I am in the middle of another bleeding episode but thankfully while it is making me tired it is a little bit more manageable than the last few have been. I got some bloodwork done recently and I am very anaemic but luckily not enough to warrant blood transfusions which they first thought might be the case. I am on iron supplements and an iron rich diet, and am looking forward to seeing my GYN in a few weeks to get this all sorted. I am so thankful this episode is a little more subdued. The the last two have forced me to bed for a few days but this one I have been out and about instead of being housebound. Hopefully this will be the last one before my appointment with the doctor and I can say goodbye to all this.

Lastly we received Xavier's eye patches from the Royal Childrens Hospital and have had our first go at patching his eye. We are supposed to patch him for 3 hours, 6 days a week. So far we have managed one 20min stint where we managed to distract him with a toy. All the other times we have tried he has layed on the floor and cried and tried to get it off. It is really heart breaking and I hate doing it. Hopefully soon he can get used to it and realise it is going to do him some good. I guess all he sees right now is "hey get this thing off me! it is making it so hard for me to see!" All we can do is keep trying and keep taking little steps in the right direction.

Well thats all from me, sorry for the novel. Enjoy your week everyone! xoxoxo

Xavier's eye specialist appointment

Pretty self explanatory title :) I just wanted to fill you all in on the latest updates with Xavier's eyes. We saw the paediatric opthamologist about 5 weeks ago and as you know, Xavier was prescribed some glasses, which he has been coping with like a champion. We had our follow up appointment with the P.O. again yesterday just to check and see that the glasses were doing their job. Unfortuneately even though they seem to be helping him a whole lot, they aren't going to be enough to fully fix his eye problems like the doctor first thought. He has quite a bad turn in his right eye and the doctor was confident the glasses would be enough to correct this. The turn has not improved which apparently it should have started to do by now. More tests were conducted at the appointment and it turns out that the right eye has now become what they call a lazy eye.

The correct term for a lazy eye is "amblyopia" and basically the specialist explained to me that because the turned eye has been confusing Xavier's brain, what the brain does to eliminate that confusion is it begins to "turn off" some of the pathways that send messages back and forward from brain to eye. Now that eye has very limited vision and so we need to help Xavier's brain turn those pathways back on again. The way we are going to do that is Xavier is going to wear a patch on his "good eye" for 3 hours every day, so that the bad eye is left to do all the work. Hopefully this will send messages to the brain that the eye now needs to be working. That is the best I can do at explaining it all!

I have ordered some special eye patches from the Royal Childrens Hospital and they should come next week and we will be able to start working at getting this eye right. The doctor said that it will be a tough road because when we take away his good eye by patching it, he will be quite distressed at the limited vision he will have. I am feeling really sad about it all! My poor baby. I have spoken to his day care about all of this and they have been incredibly supportive and said they will work with us as best they can. The director of the centre told me her little boy also needed patching so she knows what I am going through. What a coincidence!

We are going back to the eye specialist in two months to check on Xavier's progress. Fingers crossed the patching will do the job! The alternative will be eye surgery and I am really hoping obviously that we can avoid that, but of course anything that will help him will need to be done. The eye specialist is also going to check out my eyes while we are there next time as I actually have the same condition as Xavier (amblyopia of the right eye). Wonderful genetics huh! As a child I also had to endure patching and two surgeries. The specialist was asking me about my condition when we were discussing Xavier and in our conversation he asked me when I last got checked out. I informed him that apart from seeing the in store optometrist when buying new glasses, I had not seen an actual eye specialist since I was 16, because even though my vision is quite shocking it does not seem to be getting worse, as my glasses script is always the same according to the optometrist, so I have never bothered following it up with the specialist. He told me that this is apparently very naughty and so I booked myself in to see him the next time Xavier goes. He sees adults as well obviously!

Well, I better sign off and get some sleep! Night everyone!

Tammy and Jennifer's jewellery give-away!

My lovely friend Tammy is hosting a jewellery giveaway for HER friend Jennifer who sounds equally as lovely :) Basically, Jennifer makes and sells her own one of a kind jewellery pieces. The proceeds from the sales of her jewellery are to fund her IVF treatments. So not only can you pop over to Jennifer's blog and end up with a nice piece of jewellery that nobody will have seen before, but you will also be supporting a very worthwhile cause as well. Pay day is tomorrow for me and I am looking forward to snapping up some earrings I have my eye on :)

If you check out Tammy's blog on the above link you will see quite a few different ways in which you can enter the draw to win a birds nest necklace made by Jennifer. As much as I hope to win it myself, I also hope you do visit Tammy's blog for the chance to compete with me, and of course Jennifer's blog as well. Even if you can only afford to browse, her jewellery really is something to see!

Have a great week everyone!

Finding the brave girl within

This is a bit corny but I honestly feel like infertility has taught me much more about myself than what I would have ever known had babies been an easy thing for Joel and myself to come by. If you had've told me at, say, age 18 that I was going to be labelled an "infertile" and so was my husband, and that kids were going to be in doubt for us then I would have told you that I couldn't survive that. I might have also said something selfish like I wanted a different husband or something. But 9 and a bit years older and I can thankfully say I CAN survive that. I also would never dream of wanting a different husband (actually I just watched the movie "The Holiday" and I think Jude Law could be nice! hehe). All jokes aside, my husband really is the best there is. I know without a doubt that God means me to be with this man forever, and if that means that through my problems or his, that we can't have any more children then I guess we are not supposed to. I am glad I have learnt to be the type of woman who can realise this.

Somewhere along the journey of infertility, people started labelling me with words like "brave" and "strong". Let me tell you though, when I was in the midst of such a tough time, I really thought these people were crazy. People would say "you are coping so well, you are such a strong person" and I would think "my goodness if they only knew that I am barely hanging on here". But I guess they ended up being right because time went on, I fought the battle, and though I was barely hanging on, I DID hang on until the end. Thankfully I also "won" because I have my boy. It wasn't until recently, that I looked back on all we had been through that I saw how brave and strong we really had been, because at the time it was just something we had to do, not something we did because we were brave.

Sometimes when I have a hard day, I try to remember how brave I am, and how sometimes being brave means different things. Sometimes being brave just means getting up and making it to work that day. Sometimes it means having the courage to smile and shrug off an insensitive comment. Sometimes it means to fight with all your worth. And sometimes, like I am discovering these days, it means having the strength to admit that the battle is over, and you need to move on. After having the miscarriage, last July I could not for the life of me imagine being in that place. But here I am, and even though it hurts a lot, I also have found peace.

I really had to dig deep for that inner brave girl yesterday when I took Xavier to his weekly swimming lesson. Joel was home and decided to accompany us and to take Xavier into the water, so I had the rare task of sitting and watching. Along came the mother of Xavier's little swimming friend carrying her new 8 day old baby girl, and she sat down next to me. I admired the little girl and asked her name. I was taken aback to discover that she had been given the very same name that we had picked out for a girl when I was pregnant with Xavier. For some reason that made me sad. Then she asked me would I like to hold the baby and I felt impolite to say no. While I was holding this gorgeous baby girl and gushing over her, as I do with babies in general, the questions started coming in about "when are you and Joel going to have another one?". I took a big breath, put on a big "I'm totally fine with this" smile and said breezily "oh unfortuneately we aren't able to, as much as we'd like to." That was really hard to do, and is still smarting a little today. But hey, I did it, and I survived!

If you're an idiot and you know it clap your hands!

Can you hear me clapping my hands? haha Yes it's true I am officially an idiot. Not only do I cry at TV weddings but I also buy pregnancy tests at 9pm for no apparent reason. This is completely ridiculous and stupid, I know that. In my defence I didn't go out just to buy the pregnancy test. I went out to buy bread. And I haven't bought a pregnancy test for so so long. Not for at least 2 days. Ok that last sentence was a joke. It has been many many many months since I last purchased one haha. It is just that I was picking up my bread and saw a pregnant lady and thought to myself "hmmm that reminds me..." which started a series of "I wonders" and that led to me picking up a test and adding it to my basket.

Of course I completed the test and saw the regular one line, felt crappy and therefore ate an easter egg which I had also purchased along with the pregnancy test and the bread. So there you have it. I expect the Australian Prime Minister will make an announcement in the morning confirming how I am an idiot. If you don't want to be friends anymore I understand hahaha

Love Jo xoxoxo

Many many things to catch up on...

I apologise for my absence. My best friend has been very unwell of late and I have been pretty stressed and busy visiting her, helping her mum out etc. I won't go too much into it for her privacy but basically she has had an emotional breakdown. She has had a lot of health problems in the last few months - one after the other. Now it appears her partner has ended their relationship because her health problems have been too stressful for him (yeah nice huh?). Basically everything has been building up for her over the last few months and now she has found this last development pretty tough to take. She is quite unwell emotionally at the present and we are all trying to help her as best we can. I would really appreciate your positive energy and prayers for her. God will know who you mean!! :)





Thanks Tammy and Amy for travelling across from the old blog to the new one. Thank you Amy for the comments on Xavier's name. Yes I love it too! The reason we chose that name is a nice story. I was originally stuck on the name Samuel for a boy because of the story of Hannah from the Bible. I was totally in love with the name but then when we had the 20 week ultrasound and they told us we were having a boy, I all of a sudden felt directed away from the name. It was really strange but I just knew we were not having a Samuel! So Joel and I sat down and got out the old baby book and read out names from it together. If we liked a name we would then look at its meaning and see if it was significant to us. We got to the name "Xavier" and both of us lit up instantly and said we loved it. Then we looked at the meaning and saw that Xavier means "a bright new home". We were sold on the name then! As lots of you going through infertility know, sometimes your home can become a sad place at times. There are empty rooms with no kids in them, injections and hormones in your bathroom cupboard, lots of tears shed in bed at night etc. We just knew our boy would make our home into a beautiful place and bring joy into it. Sure enough he did!





Speaking of Xavier, I couldn't be more proud of him! He got his new glasses a week ago (you might remember from my old blog that he has been having some problems with his motor development and that this has recently been put down to some problems with his eye sight) and he is doing so well with them! It has really positively impacted on everything from the way he plays with his toys, to his ability to pick up his food and feed himself, and he is now enjoying books and different things that he didn't show much interest in previously. Here is my gorgeous boy in his specs. Hope you like his t shirt too! I found it online:



Lastly, some news on me: I am booked into my specialist to sort my bleeding issues out on April 14. I am proud of myself for making the appointment. I am a little sad I can't lie. This was heightened by the passing of March 6 this weekend which would have been my due date if my pregnancy last year had have turned out better. However most of me is peaceful and even excited at the prospect of having this horrible health problem sorted. It has been a terrible thing to endure since I was about 13 and it has caused me everything from embarrasment in high school to blood transfusions due to iron deficiency. It will be nice to not even have to think about it anymore.

Have a wonderful week everyone!

Jo xoxoxo