Emotional Friday

It's been an emotional day. It always takes some processing after appointments to know how exactly I feel, and that was true of today with a bonus added in at the end.
So I'll start with Abigail's swallow study. The study itself went great. Abigail was cooperative and enjoyed the barium powder added to each thing so much that she was licking it off. That's our goofy girl.
The results were that she had deep penetration of liquids in her bronchial tube 20% of the time. In more general English that means that she didn't aspirate during the study but is most likely aspirating some of the time.
We then spent the next hour with the speech therapist going over the swallow study as well as watching her eat other things, and discussing her oral motor skills. It was a bit disheartening. I wasn't that surprised by the swallow study, it was more of the other things that took me off guard a bit.
Her eating technique/skills were assessed at 10-12 months. I did not see that coming at all. So from here we are doing a few different exercises to help her eat better, stuff her mouth less, take bites, and so on. We will also be thickening all of her liquids.
The liquid thing was a bit overwhelming, but also sad. Our daughter is a champion water drinker, and we are supposed to add apple sauce to her water. So really she will be getting a more juice flavored drink than plain water. And tonight I added some rice cereal to her milk. She took one sip, sat up, and said all done as the tears rolled down her cheeks. Oh how I wished I could just give her the "nu" she wanted and make it all better. Instead she went to bed without the milk that she loves so much. I hope it gets easier as we try a few other things that we can add to her milk. She does tend to adapt well to change.
However, it has also added to my head that we keep racking up things that are going to make people not want to babysit because it's too much stuff. She could have an asthma attack, and here is what you would need to do. (With the new possibility of mastocytosis) We now have to let anyone know that it's possible she could go into anaphylaxis at any time for no apparent reason, and then give them a lesson on an epi-pen. So today we added that she can't drink anything you might be having because it has to be thickened with this or this, and here is the amount to add to each thing.
But to top the day off Jason had some blood work done earlier this week. He is having a sleep study done for possible sleep apnea, and they wanted to check on a few other things. We have sort of assumed, due to some symptoms, that Jason had some low hormone levels and that was the reason we couldn't get pregnant. And so we had expected that to come back and to have to decide from there what we wanted to do.
So today when we got the phone call that everything was normal I was excited, but also at a loss. I doubt we will do any more investigation into why we aren't getting pregnant. It was just that for the first time in years, I had a small hope that we could decide if we wanted to try for a biological child or choose to continue to adopt. And that small hope was quickly squelched. So as we have officially passed the five year mark of not getting pregnant, it feels even more final.
As I sit here writing this I truly do just feel like I am being given a little too much all at the same time. I know we have more upcoming appointments and test so I won't be able to spend much time dwelling on the here and now before I have to pick my self up and move forward again.
This post feels depressing so I will end it by bragging again about how smart Abigail is.
Abigail is extremely inquisitive wanting to know what signs are, what a letter or number is and so on. I posted a small blurp before, but she knows all of her shapes and colors, a stop sign, a Do Not Enter sign, a railroad crossing sign, at least the letters A,B,E,H,and M, and can identify at least 3,5,8,10 (the letters and numbers have been what she has pointed out and told so she may know more?) and can count from 1-10. She blows my mind with how quickly she picks up on new things.
We also watched as she walked up four steps without holding on, and has made two, two-word phrase on her own. These feel like huge wins since they are areas that she is behind in!

Feel free to pray for all of the chaos, but please also take time to rejoice with us at how great life is as well!

Ready for tomorrow,