Happy Birthday Sweet Kendra

Tomorrow, 23 April 2006, would have been Kendra's first birthday. As a matter of fact we are now only 4 hours away from the exact time she was born. How well I remember that Friday night when my waters broke. Gathry was not at home and I got the first signs at about 7pm while watching Fear Factor. I thought I was surely imagining it, I was not packed! It was 5 weeks too early! My replacement at work was only starting in 2 weeks time! But by about 9pm I knew for sure, phoned Gathry to get home quickly, packed a bag and by 2am the next morning Kendra was born. She had to immediately go into high care and since I had a caesarion section I only got to see her the next day when they organised a wheelchair to take me through to her. She looked very good for a baby born at 35 weeks.

The doctor told us that she would need an operation to correct the positioning of her anus but otherwise she was quite healthy. I had problems getting her to feed initially and then 2 days after we took her home we had to take her back to the hospital for a week with jaundice and a blood infection. Once she recovered from that she started sucking well. Then of course we discovered the Jacobsen Syndrome and our lives were changed. In the beginning it was extremely difficult to take in the fact that our child was different and nobody could tell us exactly how different she would be in future. She could have just needed a little bit of extra coaching and been mainstreamed or it may have meant a special school. Now we will never know.

It was an interesting year. We met some interesting people, made some new friends and I think changed our outlook on life quite a bit along the way. Between the operation, the eyepatches, the physio, the eating problems etc, she kept us quite busy. The last month has been quite a challenge and I have not done a post on the blog for quite a few days now as I have really not felt strong enough. There have been some really bad days and as quite a few people said, the worst was after the family had gone home and we tried to settle into some sort of a routine.

Tomorrow is not going to be quite as I had imagined it a month ago. We were going to have a big party, invite everyone, big cake, the usual exciting stuff around a first birthday. Now we will be taking flowers to the memorial park and will try not to think of what might have been. We will just try and think of the joy we had in the past year and how lucky we were to be parents and brother to such a lovely little girl.

Happy birthday my darling.