Our little fighter....

Well, First and formeost, I want to wish a Happy Belated Birthday to my Mom. She turned 29 this week....again. Ya see, my grandma Collins is 29 too so in our family, once we reach 29, we're allowed to stay 29 if we'd like. I'm not sure i like that idea, i'd rather stay 25. Anyways, Happy Birthday Mom!

Well, yeah i'm a day late on posting this but we had a busy day. Yesterday, at 9:30 am Peyton Louis turned a whole year old. LOL, at nine thirty, I told Brenden and Landon that Peyton was finally a year old and they ran around clapping and saying "Happy Birthday Cake Peyton, Happy Birthday Cake P". Their main concern was that he was able to blow out the candles on his cake that way the could eat the cake. Anyways....Peyton didnt leave the hospital after he was born until December 6th, about 3 weeks after he was born. I have tons of pictures so i'm going to try and post a picture or two from each day that he was in there....on each day this year - up until December 6th when he actualy got released. I'll try not to make them too terrible. I just kinda wanted to share what our "little fighter" has been through to make it to the Big One! So without further adu...

Obviously, this is Peyton when he was born. This is the only chance we got to see him before they rushed him to the NICU. Dr. Judge delivered him at McDonalds Womens Hospital in Cleveland which is attatched to Rainbow Babies. A few months later, i was watching A Baby Story on TLC and Dr. Judge actually delievered a baby on there.

This is a sign that the NICU nurses let us make while we were sitting with Peyton. The Lyrics on it are from the song "He's my Son" my Mark Shultz. The lyrics go "Can you hear me? Am I getting through tonight? Can you see him? Can you make him feel alright? If you can hear me, let me take his place somehow, see he's not just anyone, he's my son."

This is what Peyton looked like when we first saw him. I had only been in recovery for 5 minutes and one of Peytons NICU team came rushing into the room. He said quickly that while a normal person oxygen level is 100 peytons was only 20. The hole that they wished would stay open long enough for them to do surgery was closing fast and they had no other choice but to do a balloon septostomy on him, putting a balloon into his vein, into his heart and blowing it up and pulling it back through the wall in his heart, letting the blood and oxygenated blood to mix. Quickly dad and Rick rushed to the NICU to sign papers to allow them to do this. It was in the first half hour of his life. We finally got to see him at 4 o'clock and he had so many wires on him as well as a ventilator and cathetar. we couldnt even hold him. Just his hand.


Later that night, rick and I went back to the NICU after all our visitors had left. We spent a long time with him, not knowing what the next day would hold. After all the lights were out, the only thing lighting the room was the monitors from his and the surrounding babies.

November 14th, 2007 - Peyton looked a little better, they had washed him off finally from birth and his eyes were actually open. They had to put him to sleep and give him pain med when they did the Balloon procedure so on the 14th was the first we could actually see his eyes open. Check back tomorrow for more pics.