I know it has been a while since we posted. I want to post more, but I don’t want to bore you with our everday live. Our life has its unique little struggles but our life goes on. I have done a lot of thinking in recent days about how our circumstances impact each of our family members and those around us. I get frequent questions like “how’s Caden?”. That is a really tough question to answer for me. Often I want to just say, “go read Caden’s page” because I am so tired of telling much of the same story after 4 1/2 years. Then I realize the responsibility I have to maintain a Philippians 2:14 attitude.
So to answer the “how’s Caden?” question I will move along in this post to do just that. Caden has recently been having some rough nights. He has been running fevers and he has been needing suctioning numerous times throughout the night. Tonight I was sitter here on the couch contemplating this post with Caden sleeping on the floor at my feet. He has been struggling with a sinus infection combined with an ear infection. The sounds he was making were loud and familiar to me, but I thought that it might be informative to share the noise with you. So I recorded a few seconds of him sleeping and you listen to the mp3 below
Once the secretions build up enough Caden will begin to cough and will sometime begin to gag. That is 
when we have to suction him. The picture on the right shows the famous suction machine that has traveled everywhere with Caden since birth.  It works much like the little suction that the dentist uses on your mouth. We just reach back a little farther into Caden’s throat so we can help clear his airway to prevent aspiration on the secretions, goobers, saliva, or whatever else might collect back there.
So what is up with that puddle around the suction machine? That is a small picture into Sherry’s world over the past month. I was looking at recent pictures and saw the high number of messes that she has had to clean up with I am at work or worse yet while I am on travel to Washington DC. This mess happened while I was on one of my trips to DC last month. This was the result of faulty medical supplies. 
The feeding pump bag had a hole in it and the formula started flowing freely out the large hole and onto the floor when Sherry was trying to thread/prime the feeding tube. The other messes on the camera included Josiah’s diaper “accident” in his crib and one picture of the many occasions when Josiah’s breakfast has returned to his tray booster seat tray just a few minutes after eating. He actually went a week without throwing up and then it happen again this morning and came with a fever too.
As for me, I have been trying to juggle being a husband and father while maintaining my commitment to a small part as a pharisee in The Thorn (Seacoast theatrical presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ) while also working on one of the most aggressive documentation deadlines of my adult life. Did I mention that I am an engineer type and documentation is not one of my strong suit? The good news is that I did meet my deadline and in grand fashion. I actually presented the first documentation package of this kind that was approved on the first pass. (hundreds of pages of computer security docs) I can’t go into the details, but let’s just say that I was up against some very strong peers with much larger staffs than I have supporting me.
We did not know it when we planned it, but all these things came together right at the beginning of our most recent Growing Kids God’s Way class. We also helped plan an alumni event for the the Charleston area GFI parenting ministry that was a huge success. I think we ended up with nearly 40 families in attendance for that event last weekend. It was a lot of fun! Stay tuned to Growing Kids Charleston for pictures.
All that said I had a short conversation with one of our pastors this morning. He asked “how’s Caden” and I said that we were tossinga round the idea of taking Caden intot he ER today. Caden is on a maintenance dose of Augmentin and would likely need to be ramped up to rocephin if the ear and sinus infection progressed. Well we ended up passing on the ER trip. Caden had a faily good day even though a fever did pop back up after dark. It is nearling midnight now and he is sleeping more peacfully than he has in the past week at this time of the night. Obviously God has said yes to all those of you who have been interceding on Caden’s behalf. Thank You! Many Blessings!