Julia turned Nine Yesterday!!

Isn't she so beautiful???

My sweet little girl turned nine yesterday, and I can hardly believe it. It's gone by so fast.

For anyone who doesn't know, Julia was born 8 weeks premature and almost didn't make it. My water broke and sometime during the ambulance ride to a different hospital with a NICU (neonatal intensive care unit), something happened. The doctors think her cord got pinched because there wasn't enough fluid to support it. Anyway, by the time we got to the hospital, her heartrate had dropped to 40 beats a minute (contrast that to the normal 150). They did an emergency C-section, and I do mean emergency. It wasn't five minutes after they heard the heartbeat that I was put under general anesthesia and Julia was out a minute later.

She wasn't breathing, and her heart rate had dropped even further. They immediately put her on a ventilator and did CPR for like 15 minutes before her heart started beating on its own. She was on the ventilator for an entire week. Almost all her other organs had shut down: kidney, liver, etc. But the scariest thing in those first 45 minutes is that her blood acid level was way, way too high. Eventually even that stabilized but one of the nurses told us later that she'd never seen a baby survive with blood acid levels that high. It was truly a miracle.

So now we have our beautiful nine-year-old Julia. Except for some brain damage that causes all her motor skills to be behind (speech, oral, and fine), and a few seizures (she had one when she was three and then started having them a few years ago), she's perfectly normal. She gets really good grades at school (we're so blessed that her intellect wasn't impaired), and she's just about the sweetest thing in the whole world (despite the little attitude she's gotten lately, oh well, that's what comes of being a girl).

We love her so much and feel that she's our little personal miracle.