Being Home

I could not possibly write about how good it is to be home and have my words be sufficient. When our plane touched down in Chicago Friday at 12:30am, I cried. To the other mom's with whom I exchanged blog addresses while in China, I want to say...We made it, and isn't it incredible to return home. I could never have imagined how difficult it would be to be away from my little ones for 15 days. I wanted to hold them forever when our family met us at the airport. We came home to our SOFT beds, clean water, green grass, clean streets, etc....and boy are we more thankful for it than we have ever been before. When we got home, I held my kids and tucked them in and then had a good, long cry.

I have wanted to write, but we have been so tired I have not even felt like I was able to write. We have learned that jet lag is a real thing, and that jet lag coupled with a toddler who doesn't sleep at night makes us absolutely dead on our feet. I didn't realize what it would take out of us physically. We are all so very tired and struggling with minor illness, I think, just due to being so run-down.

Well, 2 days home and we have already made our first trip to the emergency room with Faith. Today we were headed to Delgrosso's Amusement Park for our church picnic and the kids started yelling, "Mommy, Look at Faith!" She was having convulsions in her car seat. I ran to the back of the van and pulled her out of her seat and she was burning up. She was shaking from head to toe and her eyes rolled back in her head. Now, I know this happens to many kids, but I have never had it happen to one of my kids before and it scared us to death. We took her to the emergency room. They got her condition stabalized and then did blood work and a chest x-ray. If you remember back to my post from China about her chest 2-rays and MRI, they told us she had a calcium deposit in her lung and it would never hurt anything. This was wrong. They did chest x-rays in our hospital today and she actually has a lung infection. Several doctors in China looked at her chest x-rays and MRI and none of them knew she had an infection. They told us here at our hospital that if it had gone another week untreated, it could have become life-threatening. The amazing part is that we were supposed to travel a week later than what we did. Our travel date got moved up by one week at the last minute...God knows what He's doing.

If you are still reading this, thanks for hanging in there with us. We would like to ask some specific prayer requests. First, Faith is doing much better here during the day than she did in China. She is much happier. But, she has cried most of the night every night since we have been home and we are exhausted! Please pray that she would begin to sleep at night for us. Second, the language barrier is really difficult. Please pray for her to begin to pick up her English very quickly so that she can communicate with us. I've been thinking tonight about 'not offering any sacrifice that costs us nothing'. I have needed this thought today. I don't think I ever could have envisioned how difficult this whole process has been and is still.

Love to you all.
Trusting in God for adjustments.