So now your thinking... big deal 300 posts, some people blog daily and accomplish that in less then a year, you started this blog in 2012...
True, but as I noticed yesterday that I had written 299 posts (yes if you add up the numbers on the side you will be missing two that have been written but not shared, I'm the blog master, I get to do that!) I started thinking about life since that first blog post (yes this is going to be one of the sappy, look how far we have come posts, here is your warning to jump ship now if you wish)
I started this blog for a place to write about teaching. I was posting teaching ideas and different things that I had created. Thats all this blog was ever intended to be. I had just started following other teacher's blogs and wanted to give back to that community and share things with others as well. The first 20ish posts were just about that, teaching. There was also the one with our cool movie posted pregnancy announcement in May of that year (what happens when you have two people who took several graphic design classes in high school) but by October 2012 this blog went silent... the crazy had started.
See in October 2012 I started having contractions WAY too early and was put on bed rest, no one thought I would make it until my due date in December. By a lot of prayer (and a lot of pain... I had daily contractions) we made it to December and Jillian was born. The blog still sat silent until April of 2013 when I needed someplace to give details about what was going on with Jillian, who by this point had a NG tube. Short facebook updates were just choppy and it was hard to explain what was going on in a line or two. I also needed someplace to get it all organized.
I was really hesitant at first to blog about all what was going on with Jillian. I did not want to come off as negative, or whiny. I did not want people to feel sorry for us and I kinda felt like I would overwhelm people with it all, cause honestly we were rather overwhelmed! That first month of blogging about Jillian I made 23 posts, most of them about the time we spent in the hospital that month.
I just kept thinking this blog would go back to being about teaching once we just figured out what was up. Sorry the couple of people who still follow this blog that I met from the teaching community when this blog first started, a little girl has taken it over, and its hers now. Not that I dislike teaching, I still post new things from time to time on Teachers Pay Teachers, but I feel not need now to promote those things with blog posts, you like them or you don't, I worked in sales in collage and at this point I am ok with just letting what sells sell, not like I make much after TPT's cut.
This week has been full of reflecting anyhow with Brent's grandma passing. I have been going though pictures (which Jillian has really enjoyed) and looking at life in the 10 years I knew grandma (yes come this November Brent and I will have been together for 10 years, crazy!) This week here has been a wrestle with the why questions, and I have been thankful for some awesome friends who have let me ask the hard things and reminded me of the truths I know.
Earlier tonight a cup grandma got me a couple years ago for Christmas shattered on the floor (I have several different coffee mugs that mean a lot to me, 4-1 from grandma with the letter U on them that she used to remind me I was part of the family, one from a dear friend in collage that now owns her own coffee shop, and one from a woman's retreat where the speaker hand made us all mugs) Brent and I just stood there looking at the mug stunned, we have had these mugs for a couple of years, but not long enough that I would call them old. We use them frequently as they fit the 10oz cup setting on my Keurig with just enough room for the amount of creamer I use, but they don't look in bad shape at all. And within a second we lost one, gone. It just felt like the past week of our life. If you had asked me two weeks ago who I knew that I thought would die next, grandma Jill was not high on that list (not that I am counting down or wishing for anyone else to die) but yet here we are now and it feels rather like that mug on the floor. But I will always remember there were 4 mugs, just because that 4th one is gone does not mean we forget, or treasure any less the person that got them for us. Yes, if you had told me when I started this blog in 2012 that grandma would be gone now, I probably would have screamed at you, and not believed you.
We did get some good news today. While I am still trying to get Jillian into neuro, her results from the samples they took in her throat and stomach came back (this is NOT the same thing as her muscle biopsy, that still has several weeks before we find out) and even though her throat looked bad the testing on the sample came back better then they thought it would. This is good news that we are grateful for! We see GI again next week to talk further about things.
We took the bandages off her leg tonight since they had hit that gross dirty look and we were at the point that the surgeon said they could be taken off. The scar looks great and is healing really well. The worst part of it now is the yucky tape marks.
Tomorrow we find out if the state has decided to start paying for Jillian's PT again. I am really hoping so, I hate fighting over stuff like this. Trust us state, we don't do PT every Monday 20 minutes away because there is nothing better to do.
Some interesting stats on this blog:
Top 3 posts by views:
1. Securing a GJ tube
2. Why Awareness (this one was picked up by a special needs mom page)
3. Securing a GJ tube part 2
1 & 3 don't surprise me because when I was trying to figure it out I google searched how to tape that silly thing a ton of times myself, prompting me to blog our solutions because there was a lot of trial and error that went into figuring it out and I am hopeful that the info helps someone else
The post I did on her Comfy Lift bed gets visited frequently as well
Most people get to the blog by facebook. I do post the links to most of my blog posts on my facebook page but not all, including not all the ones I wrote this week. Google sends a few this way too, a lot of them come from a search for yellow vomit... :)
*yes in case you did not know, it tells me how many people view my blog, from what county and how they got to the site, not it does not tell names, ect, I can't see who exactly looked at the blog just statistical numbers*
But the point of this blog is not views, even though it means a ton to me that people read it, and while it has changed from a teaching blog to a special needs mommy blog (it is still weird to type that cause I still don't always see myself as fitting in as a special needs mom) there are still some basic goals of this blog:
1. Document the journey, both as a reference and a reminder
2. Share info we have learned along the way to help others
3. A place for me to get some of my thoughts out
4. But most of all, my prayer is that you can see the works of God in this blog and that it would lead people closer to Him. This includes me, that I can look back all of the different things I have written about and use it as a reminder of all the things God has done for us!
So there you have it, my sappy 300th blog post, and a record for this week, I made it though without tears! Hope you enjoyed and hope you continue to enjoy!
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