The Updates are Coming!

Our dear friends old and new,
A brief note of explanation.
Please forgive me for the long silence on Audrey's blog!  The past four months our lives have been so chock full of miracles, heartbreaks and adventure that I have been unable to keep up with writing about it, and I have only just now managed to eke out a few hours to begin the updating process.  In December my laptop broke and it took several weeks to get it fixed.  There are more than 25 blog posts in draft form that will be posted over the next couple of weeks, covering the months of December through March, and for the moment I feel I owe you a lightning fast summary of our current state.  Audrey's progress has been up and down these past four months, but the highs, when we have them, are definitely getting higher. For example, sometimes now, soon after her dilations, she can eat almost like a normal toddler!  When she is open, she is learning to chew and swallow and her fear of certain kinds of foods and drinks is definitely being overpowered by her curiosity and thirst to learn more about life and the part food plays in it!  We needed to stay in Massachusetts much much longer than planned and wound up saying good bye to the rest of our family soon after New Years, and then staying (through the immense generosity of new friends) at our rental home in Southern Massachusetts until Audrey was cleared to return home to Utah, and return every few weeks for further treatment.  We saw our beloved Utah home for the first time in over six months at the end of February, then turned around and came back to Boston the following week for a few days, then went home again for two and a half weeks, and came back again, and then again, and we are now on our fourth trip back to Boston for a dilation.  In the time I have been home I have been cleaning and organizing like a madwoman to reclaim my home from long months of "momlessness" and helping the children to get resituated with their doctor and dentist appointments that needed to happen, as well as working hard to refill their emotional buckets.  So in a sense, what a friend said to me tonight is true, that we simply needed to "circle the wagons" for a bit.  Thank you for your patience.  I confess I did hit a snag on a difficult post I was writing back in early December, that I needed to put on the shelf for a while, and it held up the works just long enough to prevent writing about the flood of information that quickly followed.  I will be working hard over the next few weeks to get caught up and share with you the surreal adventures we have had recently, but for now, please know that we are still here, we are still fighting our battle, and we are so grateful for you!