A blessing...

At the beginning of 2008, Matt and I were happily married for over seven years, and had a "perfect" life - we lived in a cute little white house that his grandpa had built, he had work in the architectural field (both of us have Masters degrees in Architecture), and I was a stay at home mom for our two healthy children - a little boy, almost three, and baby girl, almost one. BUT, over the course of 2008, God had mighty plans for Matt. Matt had spent his whole life growing up in a nice Christian church in a family with parents who had both been missionaries before they were married, and believed himself to be a Christian, but God shattered his misconceptions and revealed Himself to Matt that summer in a way he had never seen before, and Matt realized that his whole life to that point had been a facade - he had somehow grown up believing that working hard to put on a good face and do the right thing was all there was to being a Christian. Over the course of that summer, God used intense physical pain to keep Matt on his back and with not much else he could do, he used that time to read his Bible. For the first time in his life, it opened up to him and came alive to him. More accurately, Matt himself became alive for the first time in his life, and he was able to hear the Word of God for what it was. That summer was a delight, as towards the end he was daily showing me this or that, or all of the above from what he was reading that he was seeing with fresh eyes, and the ability to truly believe it - not just saying he believed it, but real believing, in a way that dramatically changed the way his life worked.

One significant night came toward the end of September, 2008, as he was reading through the Psalms.

Matt: Andrea - listen to this - it says here [Psalm 127] that children are a blessing from the LORD!

Andrea: Yes, Matt. It does. They are!

M: No, Andrea. It says they are a blessing. [He looks at me.] If God says children are a blessing, then why are we trying to stop God from blessing us?

A: Well, because you only want to have two children. [NOTE: I had always been slightly radical. I wanted to have three. My "plan" was to have one baby and then have twins so I'd get my three and he couldn't say no! Ha ha. Little did either one of us know!]

M: But if God says that children are a blessing then it seems like a silly thing to try to stop him from blessing us.

So just like that we were done with birth control, and two weeks later our third child, Reuben, was conceived. That's just one example of the crazy kind of stuff that can happen when you decide to take God at his word!! ;) With both Owen and Leah we had forgone finding out the gender of our child before birth - with each successive pregnancy I've been more anxious to find out, but Matt's pretty hard-core about waiting, so we wait. We decided pretty soon that if this baby was a boy, we would name him Reuben Matthew. Reuben means "Behold, a son!" and Matthew means "a gift from God." We tossed around some ideas for girls, but never came to any consensus. We had no idea what significance that name would have for us as time went on. But at the moment, it was a beautiful name for a child that came to be because we trusted that children were a blessing - a gift - from God.

Reuben's birth was the most beautiful, peaceful, (relatively) easy birth experience I've had or heard about from others. One lovely thing about having him be born at home (a planned home birth with the same midwife who had delivered Owen and Leah at home) was that everything happens in a very relaxed fashion. One precious memory I have is the first hour after his birth - he slipped out and he was brought right up to my chest, and I just held him there, both of us snuggled up in the blankets, for a full hour before checking to see if this dear baby was even a boy or a girl. It didn't matter to me. I was so deliriously happy to be holding this precious gift from God that I didn't care if Baby was a boy or a girl - I had just wanted for so long to hold this baby in my arms, and it didn't matter to me who the baby was. Knowing now what I did not know about Reuben then, I still get shivers when I recount this.

God had prepared us so beautifully to be this special boy's parents. And I assume he still is doing that in ways we are unaware of right now for things yet unseen. That's the way he works!

We delighted in being a "big" (ha ha!) family - well, at least larger than average. Three is hardly "big." ;) One thing I've always taken pleasure in about motherhood is seeing all the unique qualities of each tiny person we'd been blessed with. As a home-schooling-hopeful mom, I also took pride in recognizing the "wide range of normal" that is part of what it is to be human, and would scoff at systems that require everyone to fall within set parameters. This mentality is part of what made us slow to dig too deeply into the delays that we saw in Reuben over his first year. He was definitely pushing the window of "normal" development, but we chose to let him continue following his own timetable. He didn't roll over until he was 9 months old, and though he was sitting before then, would inexplicably tip over for a lot longer compared to Owen and Leah when they were learning to sit up. At a year, he was not yet crawling. He started crawling a day after 13 months. But he was a delightful little boy, and from very early we found him to be our most relational child.

Over this first year I had a growing sense that we were not going to get to "keep" this little boy. It's an unusual thing to spend months thinking that your delightful little baby may be taken from you - may die! But I kept having that sense, and as a result, had to wrestle with God and what his goodness looks like. Repeatedly I was reminded that he could be just as good in taking this gift from us as he was in giving him to us, and that knowing so clearly that Reuben was a gift from God, I marveled in God's grace in preparing me ahead of time for him to be taken. After a few months of this, Matt and I realized that we had both been feeling this way independently, and for the next few months, spent time together talking about this possibility.

When Reuben was 14 months old he started having seizures. He had 2-3 per month, and they were so mild that although we noticed something odd for a few moments every now and then, we certainly weren't thinking it was anything significant, and it certainly didn't even cross our mind that he was having seizures. But the Saturday before Thanksgiving, 2010, he had one that WAS more serious (breathing suspended long enough that his lips were turning blue). After a call to 911 and a visit from paramedics, who saw nothing out of the ordinary with him (seizures are like that!) we took a leisurely ride to the ER in an ambulance and came home with no answers. We figured we now knew why God had so compassionately prepared us to lose this boy. This was going to be it. After a repeat Monday morning, were admitted to Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare on Tuesday for a VEEG (video electroencephalogram). I was 10 weeks pregnant with our fourth child, but that's another story!

Everything was normal until Wednesday morning when he had a classic tonic/clonic seizure - the type that everyone thinks of when they think "seizure." He had never had one like this before. About an hour later he had a second one. And just like that, we had a diagnosis of "epilepsy" for our baby boy.

And with that diagnosis, there was such a flood of joy!!

God had prepared us to lose this boy, this blessing, and tearfully and prayerfully we had already given him back to God. And then in a rush, he was given back to us - epilepsy is not something you DIE from, it is something you can LIVE with! In a sense we did lose the "normal" boy that we thought we had, but we most emphatically felt that through the grace of God he had enabled us to give Reuben up to him fully expecting to lose him, and then in that diagnosis, God most graciously gave him back to us - our Reuben, our blessing from God, just with a whole new understanding of who he was, and that was in many ways the beginning of a deepening of our understanding of what a blessing is.

Over the next year and a half, seizures and periodic multi-day hospital stays for further VEEGs became a regular part of our life, as did a round of attempts at controlling the seizures through medication. None worked, and with the exception of a 7 week repreive before Reuben's baby sister was born not quite seven months after his dianosis, the seizures continued. In early 2012 Reuben's neurologist ordered genetic testing and we found that Reuben has ring(20) chromosome syndrome - a very rare (~70 known cases) genetic mutation that causes seizures, moderate cognitive impairment, and is also the explanation of Reuben's very slow gross motor development (he can now at 3.5 years walk, and walk fast, but not run or jump) and his inability to speak despite 2+ years of speech therapy.

This dear boy IS a blessing - God went out of his way to make sure we knew that and didn't miss it, and we hold that out before us as we walk forward.

This was a long post - I hope to give you the rest of the story in smaller bites, but this is a critical part of how God shaped and prepared us for K. More about that in another post!