Happy Birthday Dominic!!!!

It is one year ago today that Dominic was born:

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/dominicgundrum/journal/6

A whole year has gone by since we laid our eyes upon his face, heard his husky little voice, touched his little hands and feet and took in what our little man was all about.  It was a year ago that he took us and everyone by surprise when he exceeded everyone's expectations.  He has traveled more and gotten to know more people than some can claim to know in a whole lifetime, he has touched hearts (especially ours),  and he has brought people back to prayer.  He has been God's tool, his instrument in which He worked his mighty deeds, what a life you have lived so far Dominic!!  When this whole journey began, there was no way we could have ever seen all of the good that could come from your little life with its large struggles.  From the onset, it was a scary unknown place that we were not sure how it would turn out.  It is a lesson for me to look back on your last year and remember how it felt to be looking at your predicted future, having no idea just how many would be deeply touched by your story, the lesson in that is life-changing!  And yet, I find myself again looking down the road to the next surgeries you will endure and again feeling unsure about how it will turn out, so the lesson on your first birthday Dominic is: TRUST.  Trust in God and His plan for your life.  The lesson is also:  have CONFIDENCE that He knows what He is doing and I can rest in that.  There also needs to be: DETACHMENT from my own will and allow God to pierce our hearts for the good of our own souls and others, because as we have learned, it is from these piercings that God is allowed to enter in and fill our hearts with GRACE.  Thank you God for our beautiful son!

I know I have not been blogging, but please understand that I have seven other children that need my care just as much as our Dominic, in fact, I think they needed a little more TLC after the last surgery.  We have all enjoyed being a family again without the large stressors of Dominic's care, life has become more "normal" again (when I say normal, I mean as normal as it can be with eight children and homeschooling them) and that is a good thing!  I do hope that I haven't hurt anyone by not keeping you up to date, I do care about all of the readers as you have become sort of like extended family. You all have given of yourselves with your gifts and prayers and I would never want you to think that I did not appreciate that.  Truly, a day doesn't go by that I don't think about how grateful I am to all of you for what you have done for us.  Every time I think of it, I say a prayer of thanksgiving for you. 

I have pictures to share and more videos than you'd ever want to see of Dominic (take your pick!) since I haven't posted in a while, so I hope you enjoy.  Dominic is a sweetheart, almost always smiling and laughing.  He does have a spunky temper, especially when he sees his family members eating and he feels that he is not getting the same food.  He has a voracious appetite, as I am sure you can tell by the pictures.  He does real well with feeding himself any food and can pretty much eat whatever we eat.  His first two teeth started coming in last week.  Dominic does not crawl yet, but is making his milestones in the order they should happen, just behind a normal schedule.  Dominic is very interactive and loves to play interactive games.  His vision is still a question, but we are just so grateful that he can see.  Dominic is scheduled to have his next surgery on his palat in Chicago on Aug. 13th.  Prayers would be appreciated!  Thank you for continuing to keep Dominic in your prayers, you are the reason he is here today bringing us so much joy!  Enjoy the pictures and videos!

http://youtu.be/9LPaMZ6ouxE 

http://youtu.be/IPxvD9d9Z6Q

http://youtu.be/8PYHdI5BRH8

http://youtu.be/IYUhNnHEvqM

http://youtu.be/qdcY8_9qANI

http://youtu.be/RM7VMg9KKDQ

           We've added a few animals this spring:

 Dominic during a therapy session at our home:

 Dominic's favorite goat Emmy

 The Birthday boy (thank you M.S. for the outfit!):)

Again, no news is very good news!

So, it has been a long time, I am so sorry! There is a part of me that is really enjoying normal life again and another part that wants to be as far away from the medical side of everything that we went through, in other words, I just needed a break from it all!  It  has been so good to have normal life and enjoy all of my children again, I missed them!  I will sum up how Dominic is doing (which is great!)

Dominic is filled with many smiles!  He is sweet, loving, and lovable.  He reaches his arms out to be held, he loves to be snuggled (all of the time) and he loves games with his siblings.  Dominic continues therapy three times a week in the home.  He is behind physically because he was on his back for over a month, but he really is doing well.  About four weeks ago he started sitting up on his own, it made me so happy I cried, I really did not think we would see that until he was about a year.  We will see how he progresses and what he will do next! Dominic's vision is ever changing, whereas he is definitely seeing better than before surgery, we are not sure what is vision is like at this point, time will tell.  Dominic still has a g-tube, but it not used.  It is there until he gets through his next surgery in July, that will be the closing of his cleft palat, the hard and the soft.  He  will have that surgery done in Chicago with Dr. Gosain.  OUr insurance would only cover the next surgeries with a doctor/hospital that is in-network and this doctor communicates with Dr. Meara, we are so blessed to have such good/talented surgeons!  I will post more as I get more pictures, but for now I will leave you with a short video of our sweet boy!

I will also post about the boy  from China that I had posted about, he has a lot of great news!

Blessings, and thank you for keeping him in your hearts and prayers!

note:  yes at the end of the video he fell backwards, oops! He was more angry than anything!

http://youtu.be/u4GMWGJ4U24

Dominic was in the news last night!  The little boy I am advocating for, Dong, well, he made it into the segment also! :)  They had not looked closely enough when they put the pictures into the story.  Here it is, see if you can find Dong :)!

http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/193445511.html

Just as a note, the reporter was the nicest guy and we felt very comfortable with him, he did a great job!

And here is a quick photo of Dominic and his friend he played with yesterday!  I wish I could make it larger!  Oh well.... this was taken with video.

It has been such a long time!!!  This is a long post, but please make it to the end (or skip to the end) because there is something so dear to my heart that I am posting about.  Things are going well with Dominic, very well in fact!  Some highlights for Dominic are:

Dominic is completely off of the oxy-codene as of two days ago.  We had one final day of crabbiness and reaction from coming off of the medication and now we are enjoying the Dominic we always knew!  He again is filled with so much joy and smiles, it makes me tear up to even be sharing this with you because there were times when I wasn't sure I would ever be able to say this, I wasn't sure if we had somehow lost our little fellow through the surgery.  Thank you God for the gift of completely giving us our son back!

We have not had to monitor his sodium levels closely, or any other levels for that matter, he has been stable for so long.  We will have to check them every so often, but it is not the situation we had when he first came home, making life a whole lot easier.

Dominic is sleeping through the night!!  There are a few strange nights that he stays up all night, but most nights he is going down for 8 hours straight!  This momma needed this!

Dominic is taking a whole lot of his food by mouth and hardly anything by g-tube (stomache tube).  He even takes fluids with a syringe as he would a bottle.  I don't think we are completely out of the woods yet with this one as he tires from taking it from the syringe before he takes in the needed amount, but nonetheless this is great for his developement and muscles in his mouth.  He succeeded in pulling out his g-tube last week which required us to be in hospital for the day (they wanted to establish it was in it's proper place)  Now I will be able to change the tubes on my own in the future if this happens.

We saw the surgeons for the next surgery which is due for July.  Dominic will have his soft palat and hard palat fixed in one surgery when he is 13 months old.  This surgery will be done by a doctor in Chicago. This surgery is very important so he will be able to talk, one cannot make words without a palat, the air rushes through and out the nose!  In all honesty, I am not ready to think about this next step, I feel as if I am just starting to come up for air and am enjoying the normalcey of every day life.  Thank goodness this surgery is not as dangerous as the last one, but it is still major surgery. 

With everything going so well, I have had a chance to reflect on all of you.  I know I have said it many times, but please, I hope you know that your helping our family out in the way you did has changed my life.  I am hoping that you all know how grateful I am for all of your gifts of love!  I have started sending out "thank yous" but please know that if you haven't gotten one yet, your gift was and is greatly appreciated.  It is taking me more time than I had wanted to send out my thank yous, but that does not mean we did not appreciate what you have done for us!  Here are some pictures of Dominic taken today! 



And now I am posting about something so dear to my heart, please open your hearts to what I am going to show you, open your hearts to a helpless little sweetheart that has completely captured my heart.  It is not just this little sweetheart but the plight of many little children that I want to speak about, but right now I want to introduce you to a little fellow named Dong.  Dong is from China and was born with the same type of clefting my son was born with, only more severe, clefting to the side of the face.  While my son was born into a loving family and support, Dong was dropped off at an orphanage where they take care of the children that are dropped off because of disfigurement, disability, or medical needs.  This is something that happens all over the world, these little ones are abandoned.  Lucky for Dong, he was dropped off at an orphanage run by the Little Flowers Project http://www.littleflowerprojects.org/
a wonderful ministry that I have been following for over a year.   I saw this little one was born and my heart just melted thinking, "who will adopt this little guy", my heart just broke knowing I would love to be able to help him.  I had moved on, figuring I couldn't do anything for him but pray.  I was always looking out for updates on him and recently I saw that he is in Texas getting his surgery by a surgeon there that is helping the Little Flowers Project.  I was so excited to see this for him!!  Imagine my surprise when the other day I received an e-mail from a friend back in MN sending along a picture of Dong with his chaperone ( his chaperone went to China to bring him to the U.S.), she said the chaperone had become aware of Dominic's story and wanted me to have a picture of Dong.  When I contacted her, I told her of my surprise and she responded saying she was just as surprised when this friend had sent her the link to Dominic's story, as she had just read about it in China and she had read the blog.  WOW!  A coincidence?  I think not!!

I am asking for prayers for Dong, I am asking that you put him in your heart like you did Dominic.  He is a helpless, little baby that needs love just like everyone else, and he deserves it.  I love him already and I have never met him.  I am going to ask that you consider bringing this little soul into your lives.   If you have enough love, that is all you will need!  Is this something you are called to do, be blessed by adopting this dear child?  I am going to post a picture of him with his chaperone, Shannon.  After that is a link to a very important trailer that addresses this issue of children with special needs being viewed as useless.  It is called the "Drop Box" and lest we become judgemental about other countries' ways of dealing with their unwanted children, we must remember, in the U.S., most of our disabled children never even make it into a "Drop Box".  This picture is so small I am giving you a link to the blog with many pictures of him.  http://littleflowerprojects.blogspot.com/2013/02/headed-to-dallas.html

and here is the link to the Drop Box :  http://www.dropbox-movie.com/trailer.html

Blessings!!

I almost don't know how to begin this post after all of the attention Dominic's story has received.  I think I fear I will never be able to appropiately express my gratitude to everyone who has been involved in celebrating Dominic's life and progress.  Most of the time when we suffer, we know God makes good come out of that, but we do not get to see the effects of the transformative power of suffering.  We do not get to see how in the end, our sufferings can truly help others in a way that just words or actions cannot.  Somehow the lessons that come from suffering are more powerful and life changing, more so than any other life lesson.  I realize we have been given a rare gift to see so many celebrate Dominic and his life.  It has been so encouraging to hear how peoples' lives have been changed because of his story.  We are grateful for this gift, we are grateful to all of you for pouring out your love, support and prayers.  I am certain it is exactly your prayers and love that finds us where we are with Dominic today, and that is a very good place!!

Some of Dominic's progress is:

We are returning the feeding pump as we are not doing continuous feeds anymore.  We can feed him as he asks for it without it having adverse effects on his sodium levels.

His sodium levels have remained stable.

We just found out he is not having any issues with his blood (anemia problems). The doctor actually called us with the results and told us they were "boring".  BORING SOUNDS GREAT!!

His Liver/Kidney function is stable.

Just waiting on the fungal meningitus to heal up completely, but from all appearances things are progressing the way they should be in this area.

It is so wonderful to slowly, but surely, get our little guy  back.  As we continue to wean him off of the meds., we see more of our little guy coming back.  The only thing Dominic needs to work on is his physical needs.  After being on his back for over a month, he needs a lot of physical therapy to get strong again.  He has made huge strides in this area!  Thank you again for all of your prayers and love!


                                  Sweet time with Philomena

                                 Playing with peoples' hair is one of Dominic's favorite things to do.

                                   All is good when he is with his brothers Mark and Augustine!

It is great to see him having tummy time after being on his back for so long!

                                  He is looking at a toy here (not pictured)

                                    Getting tired of tummy time :)

                                                He keeps on staring at  his hands, it is the                                   funniest thing!

                                  Always smiles with Bernadette

                                      There are those hands again!