Sweet Baby Stephen

Today my mom and I drove down to Gainesville with my little brother for his weekly therapy sessions. For those of you who don't know, here's a little background about my brother, Stephen. He was born on December 26, 2013 at 26 weeks or 3 months early. My mom had developed preeclampsia and needed to have an emergency c-section. My baby brother was born at only 1 pound 11 oz (the average baby weighs 7.5 pounds). Stephen was a micropremie and was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for 96 days.

Stephen is now 2 years old and is in need of a kidney transplant once he is big enough. He currently has a gastrostomy tube connected from the outside to the inside of his stomach for all the medicine he needs to take as well as a catheter along the inside of his body for peritoneal dialysis that is done every night while he is asleep. This filters out all the toxins inside him (the stuff that our kidneys do that his doesn't). Since Stephen was a micropremie he is behind with his growing and other developmental stages such as walking and eating real food, this is the need for all of his therapies. Now I'm sure many of you are still trying to figure out how that g-tube thing works or maybe you're laughing at the fact that I really define the term "big sister" or maybe you're just thinking about how difficult it must be for our family with a special needs child, but it is our everyday life, we're used to it by now. I'm not saying it's easy but we have our day to day routine down to a science and we love our little miracle, I mean who couldn't? Look at those glasses!!!

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