This time of year also means added patience and sacrifice for our household. I'm starting to think about all that I need to do as we prepare to relocate to Houston for a baby's arrival. Meanwhile, Walter is working day and night to harvest our livelihood. For those not in the "ag-loop" (ahh, I remember those days), farmers like my husband spend weeks, sometimes months, harvesting their year's work. The window for planting crops, caring for them as they grow, and then getting them out of the ground is extremely narrow. That's what makes this time of year so crucial. Nearly every meal he eats comes in hand-held form. It's scarfed down while he rides down a bumpy corn field. He gets home dirty and exhausted. We see each other for only minutes each day. It isn't an ideal situation for any wife at 32 weeks pregnant. Yet it's a worthwhile trade-off. This life offers breaks at other important times of the year and centers around the fading small town lifestyle, we feel, is ideal for raising a family.

The farm should slow down by the time our little guy is set to arrive. But leaving work behind is going to be extremely difficult for the both of us. I've been thinking about my students more lately, the impact they've made on my life. I've started to realize how much of my ability to cope has come from them. My son's heart defect was diagnosed a week before school started. I wondered how I would make it through each day. I feared bursting into tears as I attempted to teach my classes. It seemed like terrible timing. Then school started and things were fine! Who would've thought? The remedy to heart-breaking news...teenagers! They keep me on my toes. They make me laugh. My energies shift to them, their needs, their lives. And they're not just teenagers. They're sympathetic, kind human beings when they want to be. They even put together this beautiful prayer jar full of sincere wishes for our little family...


I'm truly going to miss my students during my time off this school year. It's all going to be a very big change living in Houston. How long? We still don't know, and we will not know. Not even the best surgeons in the world can predict the outcomes of heart surgery on a newborn baby. Just as we have been, we need to take things day by day.

A lot of you have been wanting to know more information or what exactly is wrong with our little guy's heart. The reason I've been holding back is because technical, scary terms don't really matter. They only matter to the medical team that will be treating his defects. Yes, defects. There are multiple problems with his heart. This is usually the case when it comes to serious heart malformation. When one thing goes wrong...other things can follow suit. Plus, it's worth mentioning that we've had many different diagnosis over the past few months. What we do know 100 percent is that our child's heart will not function properly when he's born. Surgery is a matter of life or death for our baby. Less important details can be discussed later.

This journey has started to make me think about my old job. A former health reporter, I knew a little bit about heart defects from stories I'd done. And despite my experiences, I'm embarrassed to say, I was still fairly clueless. I thought...you know...that something weird must've caused them. Oh, the mother must've been on some kind of medication. Oh, it must run in the family. Etc. These things do happen but are usually not the case. I haven't had as much as a baby Tylenol for the past 7 months! And Walter and I have no close family members with known heart defects! This is what makes this situation ultra sobering. We are merely a statistic. We've listened to five different doctors and a genetic counselor tell us, "this is just a random event." It's an explanation that's been given to countless other families before us. We won a really messed up version of the lottery. And though cases as severe as our son's are extremely rare, heart defects in general really aren't. They happen to 1 in 100 babies! Knowing this stat wouldn't have changed anything, but it could've helped us to more quickly accept that we aren't freaks. We didn't do anything wrong and there's no sense in continuing to question our circumstance. It's just something that happens.

Sooooo before I sign off, I gotta get to the good stuff...we've FINALLY chosen a name for our little heart warrior. Drum roll, pleaseeee!


So there you have it, a solid update! As always, pray for us and our little "Augie." Can we make that work? Pray for our transition as we prepare to relocate to Houston in November. Pray for his birth and that it pose limited complications. Pray for his medical team and the surgeons who will be mending his sweet little heart. Pray for his parents, that we continue to be strong and hopeful every step of the way! Thanks for reading as always. -Nicole