A Beautiful Glorious Mess: In Recent Days

As I start this post, I'd like you all to join me in sending great thanks & praise to our kind & merciful God who has blessed our family & above all has blessed our little Evelyn beyond imagining. We are humbled & grateful beyond measure for His goodness, compassion, & faithfulness to us. Each day, in each new step taken with our beautiful girl, God's kindness is absolutely tangible. We can see it & feel it & touch it! Evelyn continues to astound us (& her doctors) in her strength & health & we pray that she will continue to be a beam of Christ's miraculous light into this dark world. There are MANY babies out there with complex congenital heart defects who have died or are struggling to survive. Now granted, our baby has done her fair share of fighting, but every day I am dumb-founded at the amazing grace she has been given.

Praise God from whom all blessings flows.

Praise Him all creatures here below.

Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts.

Praise Father, Son, & Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Evie in January (9 months old)

In recent days, Evelyn has been completely & successfully weaned off of her anti-seizure medicine & has also been freed of her feeding tube! So now she only takes 2 meds a day & the hole in her stomach is healing & closing beautifully. We were told to expect a decent amount of leakage from her tube sight for 2 days & to expect it to leak up to 4 weeks... well... it has hardly leaked at all & even though it's only been out for 4 days, it's already pretty well closed!! Yet another example of God's kindness in our lives.

And now for some pictures (& a video) of other sweet happenings in recent days:

Still not walking (though completely capable of doing so).
Although I have to admit that much of me is just fine with her inability to get anywhere very fast!

As stated before, Evie LOVES water.
Thought these were really sweet pics of her playing in the pool in our front yard.

She is SO funny!
She doesn't like to crawl in the grass on her knees so does a bear crawl instead!

The boys like to ride with Papa on the new riding lawn mower & one afternoon Ricky completely zonked out on his lap! As I lifted him to take him into the house to rest, he woke up frustrated at me for moving him. I told him he'd fallen asleep & he said, "NO I didn't! I was just resting."