New Baby Faith Campbell Eyre

There's nothing like bringing a new baby into the world to make the holidays feel like magic! On November 23, the day before Thanksgiving, this little cherub popped in to the Noah and Kristi family to say hi! Meet Faith Campbell Eyre just a few minutes after birth with a wonderful doctor. This is his 10,599th birth (not a typo)! You gotta love this man! Just look at those wonderful faces! 

This is Noah and Kristi's Number 6! Count them!  Little Bennett on the lower right may seem uninterested but as you will see below, he was not!

As you can see, the kids adore this child!

Bless their hearts, Kristi's parents had been there since the night before Faith was born and were still there when we arrived on December 8th. After we cuddled that baby and played with the kids for a while we headed for Palm Springs where we gave a speech for a group of good parents at an beautiful golf club there. After coming from snow and cold, this was incredible!

And then it was back to Orange County and that great little family where we got to see Lyla's singing and dancing performance with this cute group of girls:

When this singing group performed at an assisted living center, Lyla was the only one who dared to go and chat with the residents. She's is an incredibly sensitive and compassionate little soul. 

I love this picture! 

We had so much fun watching McKay, Cubby and Bennett in tennis lessons and Mckay and Lyla in their piano lessons and Noah coaching both McKay and Cubby's basketball teams! It's like a replay of old times at our house! 

This picture from Instagram just made our visit complete. We love these great men who donate their time to teach their kids about things that they love!  Look at that assistant coach too!  

Love to those deliberate moms too who do all the behind the scenes stuff to make this happen as well as a myriads of other things. Not to mention their Herculean efforts to bring these beautiful children into the world!  

Mothers, Sisters and a Miracle Open Heart Surgery

Last week was incredible! On Sunday we had a memorable Mother’s Day with the Looslis! It was an extra treat because Saren had been asked to speak in church (by her husband, the bishop). She gave an inspiring talk which included some family history about my mother that I hadn’t thought of for many years. She has such a bright mind with a great sense of what is important and powerful!  How I love that woman who also happens to be an extraordinary Mother!

For the last hour of our three hour block of church services, the bishop (guess who) and his counselors decided to have the men take over the Primary and Young Women classes and let the women just relax and chat in the cultural hal with no responsibilty for almost an hour! the “retreat” was complete with cake and ice cream. It was a delight to have time to meet some of their ward members and just “visit” which is such a rare commodity in our hustle-bustle world! 

Jared made sure the Mothers with little babies (there are no classes for babies under 18 months) had a break too. Before he was done, he found one more baby to add to this group in his arms and all four were as pleased as punch!

After spending some time helping others after church, Jared then rushed home to prepare a fabulous lunch for all of us! What a guy! 

I had taken the cute Chatbook that Shawni had sent to me for Mother’s Day packed with pictures from the kids’ childhoods on….and the book that Charity had created with pictures collected from all the participants of our fabulous MFME (Mothers and Future Mothers of Eyrealm) trip to Europe last fall. It was so fun to enjoy both trips through memory lane with the kids! What a grand memory! I had first seen this book (bleow) in London with Charity who also has a copy!

Calls and singing and Facetimeing and special messages always makes Mother’s Day such a treat!

The celebration went right on through Tuesday since it was my best sister-in-the-world’s birthday. This wonderful woman, Lenna, is also my best friend (well maybe next to Rick) in the world. She lost her husband ten years ago to cancer. He was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer at 9 a.m. one morning just after Christmas and he passed away at 1 p.m. that afternoon.  She has been nothing less than heroic as she has gone through myriads of trials along with tremendous joys in the past ten years.

Our mom was married for the first time at age 38 to our dad, a widower who had lost his first wife to cancer. After two years of trying to get pregnant, they adopted a five year old and then immediately got pregnant with me and then, three months after my birth, mom was pregnant with Lenna. We are 12 1/2 months apart. Think of our valiant mom with two babies at age 42 1/2! My dad who already had two grown children, was 55!

One of the reasons she has done so well since Bruce’s death is that her seven children and their spouses have rallied around her with incredible support! Most of her kids and one of their spouses joined us for a birthday breakfast. These tremendous kids have rallied around her and have made her life full and exciting. She in turn has used her resources for family trips and has created incredible family togetherness. This family is packed with hard journeys and marvelous success stories and is full of light and love!

As we parted I solicited prayers from everyone for Noah and Krisit’s little two-year-old Mila who was due to have open heart surgery on Thursday morning.

Rick and I departed for Los Angeles at 5 a.m. that morning with great apprehension and worry about this little girl who was born with a heart defect and had surgery immediately at birth but was still having serious issues. To spare you all the details, the decision to go with the surgery now rather than later was heart wrenching, but they did it and they are so happy about the outcome which was even better than expected! Actually it was a miracle! 

Mila went from being in awe of the “fishies” at the aquarium at the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital….

….to playing happily in the waiting room for almost 90 minutes before they called her in for surgery. It was 1:30 p.m. before they took her up, after not one request for food or drink (she had been fasting since the night before at 9 pm). 

Her Grandfather did a great job of keeping her distracted!

This is one worried daddy along with a marvelous mother. Although they had been through the wringer on making this decison, Kristi actually wanted to go into the room to watch the surgery! The answer was “NO!” 

Even though we were ready for a three hour surgery, the Dr. took our breath away when he walked in the waiting room door after an hour and 15 minutes. A world reknowned doctor, who was also a man of few words came in and announced with conviction: “I’ve closed the hole, I’ve carved out a lot of tissue to create space for a two ventricle heart. The valve looks good. This should be the last surgery she will have to have.”

It took our breath away!  Kristi and Noah jumped up to give him a hug which he accepted, but barely, and he was gone!  We were dumbfounded. Suddenly the plethora of our worries about about her little heart ever since the day she was born were fixed…along with that little heart… and we were overwhelmed with gratitude for the miracles of modern medicine and people who gave their lives figuring out how to make bodies, especially small bodies, work!

Still it was heart-wrenching to see this, this this one strong, brave little girl!

But as the hours went by, they pulled one tube away and then another and another. By the next day, they had her standing, walking a little the next. Five days later….she went home! It was truly a miracle for which we will always be grateful!  There is six week road of recovery ahead but with these astonishing parents, but she is on her way!

 

We are grateful to some many family members, friends and neighbors who fasted and prayed for this miracle! Thank you, thank you, thank you! 

Next project…protecting her from her adoring siblings…namely: Bennett!

Easter in the Desert!

How lucky are we to be able to be with one of our families almost every week?  We spent the Easter week in the desert last week and had so mcuh fun tagging along with the Shawni and David family.

Just a few of the highlights of that whilrwind of activity follows:

I got to go with Shawni to her monthly morning at  Brain Food, a volunteer organization that provides weekend food for over 3500 needy school children at 100 schools in the greater Phoenix area. Some very smart women realized that as great as it is to provide free breakfast and lunches for kids living in poverty, the kids go home to empty cupboards on weekends. Through fundraisers and very generous donors, a large storage room provides a place where about 100 people gather every Thursday to help pack and deliver food to the schools where the kids receive the packages on their way home on Friday.

Young mothers, older mothers, “snowbirds” and retired people who are looking for a way to give back show up to help. They’ve got the system down to a well-oiled machine!  Shawni and I helped pack 800 leaves of bread and then we moved to the main room where we moved down the line filling our bags with donated non-perishable food to be packed in tubs and taken to schools.

Love there misson statement printed on the wall there, “We make a living by what we get, but we amke a life by what we give.”

Grandfather had fun “running” Lucy to the bus stop on her bike. She doesn’t almost no periferal vision so she can never ride alone. Rick had a fun time trying to keep up with her and and Shawni and I followed behind.

 

It’s pretty much a miracle that she was able to learn to ride that bike in the first place and truly an inspiration that she is an excellent student and always gets terrific grades and great compliments from her teacher!

We also had fun having lunch with Lucy in this pretty chaotic lunch room. She was delighted to see us and we had fun observing the crazy scene of the elementary school lunchroom (see Lucy on the left there looking for us just before we found her!

In the next three days we had a chance to steal Grace and Claire from school for a quick lunch and Grandfather managed to get a private dinner with Elle, but we forgot to take pictures of those fun events!

We also got a chance to see Elle play on the high school tennis team as a senior! She plays #2 in singles and #1 in doubles. We saw some terrific matches!  Grace is on the practice team this year because she hasn’t taken tennis for a while. She’s decided that tennis is her game though so we look forward to seeing her on the team next year.

It was terrific to spend time having some great meals together, especially when Josh could come. He is always ready to rescue us with comptuer issues and is so fun to talk to!  He is a such a great supporter for this family as well as for us! He is now running the Valuesparenting website which required a major…thousand hour overhall this year. We are so grateful to have a computer genius in the family in addition to his being such a thoroughly good person and incredible thrid-grade teacher! He is a wonder! 

That house is always full of friends and Granfather is always happy to find kids who appreciate popcorn!

Since it was Easter weekend, of course we had fun doing dozens and dozens of Easter eggs. Shawni and the girls just couldn’t quit once she pulled out all the “equipment!”

Our Ukaranian “son” Eldar (long story) now lives less than a mile from Shawni and David and he and his darling wife, Courtney and his mother, Valentina, who has recently immigrated to the U.S.(to their home), came over with thier three adorable children. It was great to catch up with them and hear that Eldar and Courtney are going to Singapore where Eldar will present a paper (he is a Professor of Economics) and then will be going on to our bloved Bali.. Eldar has become an excellent tennis player so we saw some pretty fancy stuff on the tennis court. Josh was a roommate of Eldar’s at BYU and is always so happy to spend some time with them!

Claire has become an outstanding soccer player!  How great it was to see her play with such determination and grit! She is going to be a star!

While we were there we had the rare privilege of meeting a terrific family that Shawni met through her blog. They used to live in North Carolina but, unbeknownst to any of them, they moved to within a couple of miles of Shawni’s house. We had so much fun going out to dinner with them and going with them to the famous Easter Pageant at the Mesa Temple.

On the night we went to the pageant it was the last performance of a two week run. We were there with 14 000 other people that night. We had great seats and loved seeing 450 dedicated volunteers who had basically given up a month of thier lives to practice for this annal Easter pageant. Inspiring and pretty incredible!

Somehow Shawni crammed in a little afternoon swim party for two families (one from Sl and other from AZ) who each have four children, two of whom are BBS kids. We have known one of them for several years but the other just discovered the diagnosis a few months ago.Both mothers were named Amy.  It was so great to catch up with the Amy we have known for several years and the new Amy who is still struggling with the diagnosis. They are beautiful moms with brave faces despite their struggle to cope. Although there are certain similarities, BBS manifests itself differently in each child so the ability to put the pieces together is always daunting! Sadly I didn’t get any pictures.

As Easter approached, Shawni was determined to finish this beautiful banner below. She got the idea from a friend and once Shawni sees a good and meaningful idea, there is no stopping her! This required several stops for paper and ribbon and lots of time cutting, but it will be so fun to have to celebrate every Easter from now on!

 

Easter morning was pure joy! The statement below which are the four most glorious words ever spoken, expressed how we all felt!

In addition to the Easter Bunny/Baskets, we heard a beautiful talk on that Easter morning from Elle and we were privileged to be there for a very special blessing given by their stake Patriarch, assisted (wth the transciption) by his lovely wife! The blessing was as beautiful as Elle is!

How we love this delightful daughter of God who is about to graduate from Hish School!

Another memorable weekend!