It's been a while!

It's been a busy time in the Drosten family. Thijs has been working very hard due to his project coming to an end. Lots of items getting last minute changes that needing completing before the end of September. On Monday Thijs took in lots of Irish Tea cake, which I'm told his colleagues enjoyed, and said goodbye to the Goudse. For now he has some free time but there is a new contract looming on the horizon so he'll be kept busy till the end of the year!
Noah is doing great. He's grown to a whopping 5400 grm and now fits into size 62cm clothes (which is a little bit to do with his belly, but he's also grown in length).
I've been kept busy by visiting Noah every day. The journey back and forth to Rotterdam is quite easy, it just takes up a lot of time, and of course there are the days when you just seem to miss every connection by inches! I love spending time with Noah, but it was all quite stressful for a while. It all boiled down to communication.

Noah was having a lot of investigative work done on his belly. Every day someone would turn up and look at him and give some scary diagnosis then later on I'd be told that it wasn't anything serious. While all this was going on Noah also started suffering from painful stomach cramps and was in considerable pain. I didn't know what was going on with his health or how to help him when he was in pain. The nurses are very efficient but it left Thijs and I feeling left out and unable to care for our child. We decided to have a talk with our doctor and nurse to see how we could change all this.

The most important thing to us is Noah's care and his condition, which is always fantastic, but we wanted to see if we could do more ourselves with the care of our son. We are so happy we did this. We've now spent the last week putting him in and out of his bed, putting him in his bath and learning how the nurses take care of his canule. We're able to put him on our laps, and it all feels just fantastic to do this ourselves and not have to wait for others to do it for us. We're scheduled to learn how to take care of his food intubator (sonde) and to give him his medicines. So finally we're more involved in his day to day schedule and Noah seems to love it too.

We had some wonderful news from our friends Paul and Wendy, their son Frank couldn't wait any longer and decided to join their family 6 weeks early. So a big Hi to Frank, and we all hope he'll be home soon.

Thijs, Lilo and I are off to Wales today to visit my dad, see some mountains and do some shopping. Hopefully there will be time for sleep as well, but I'm almost resigned to seeing grey under Thijs' and my eyes until Noah is 21!!

Bye for now and we'll blog when we're back from Wales.

xxxx The Drosten juniors