The Wild Wild Wests

i was driving down the road the other day after having dropped off two sets of kids only to return a couple hours later to pick up said kids thinking holy hell i am a serious taxi driver at the moment... my mind then wandered back to this day in the hospital...my friend was sitting beside me, this friend is the friend...you know the one that is always there. silent and f ing strong even though she may not be on the inside.  her name is morgan and i am willing to bet she has stayed with me at the hospital every. single. solitary. time that paxton has.  it started off a bit rocky when the sight of him at one week old post open heart surgery had her woozy, but from then on she was never not there for that boy or me for that matter.... anyway on one of the many stays i was crying to her that " i just want to get back to real life." she looked at me in her calm, quiet way and said "jen, this is real life..." i will never forget those words, because what i hadn't st...

in light of my last post, i would like to say thank you to the overwhelming love and support that rolled in from it. i spent a great deal of time going back and forth on whether i should write about that. in the month that i was absent from my sanctuary here, i realized there was only one reason i hadn't stopped to write... i don't come here to paint this perfect picture of my life or life in general.  oh' don't get me wrong, it. is. a. crazy. freaking. beautiful. life. no. doubt. but that is not to say there aren't major roadblocks along the way and if i skirted around those road blocks and poured glitter all over them and instagram'd them then they wouldn't be the real thing now would they.  (ps it should be noted that i am ALL for "thinstagram" and "hotstagram" just not in my writing) ten years from now i want to look back on my posts when i read them and think. oh yah! yep! i remember exactly what i felt like in that moment because m...

Paxton is ok...he is healthy...although because of his continued health that little naggy  its been to good for to long feeling has begun uh’ creepin... I have been MIA and unless you are my FB friend you were probably wondering wtf...let’s be real... it’s been months... And this is where houston and the situation come in. In an effort to be as “real” as I have always been here in my sanctuary I will tell this the best that I know how given the circumstances.  We have a very sick child.  No surgery at this point can fix that.  We have lived 3 excruciatingly hard years since his arrival.  As I have said before, HLHS ran us over, backed up and ran over us again. No one can prepare to dance so closely with your child and death that many times over.  But, we did.  We had no choice. And that doesn’t happen and not change a person. A family. A marriage.   Without going into details via the internet there has been trouble in paradise sha...

(written yesterday) i took a nap today because the man of the hour as you all know still wakes me up every night. i laid there trying to quiet my mind.  it was an old movie reel flapping turning and turning through the memories. 3 years ago today, i had said good bye to my oldest two babies and was en route to st. pete for a morning induction as i write this.  a mirage of feelings were rolling through my very pregnant body and i didn't know what to expect of the hours and days that lay ahead of me... it was more emotion that any human can prepare for. he arrived.  he fought. fought hard enough for mommy to be given the chance to hold him and kiss him and to tell him to be strong.  yah...hardest words i have ever uttered.  this screaming, beautiful, pink baby boy in no way appeared sick, but oh' was he ever.  i knew the facts, so the tears poured as i thanked the lord almighty that i was given the gift of holding him. for i had been told most likely n...

i have a shit ton of stuff to do today, but that went to hell in a hand basket this morning when i opened an email to read that another beautiful baby and her family have joined the heart world.  i made the mistake of reading it at a red light which only led to sobs of tears. it's not fu*%ing fair!! these babies do not deserve this. i am so angry today.  so, so mad at the unfu*%king fairness of it all.  and yes i am cussing like a sailor today because well... because i can and because sometimes adding the f bomb for emphasis helps.  i have been doing pretty good, but today driving home in my mommy minivan i cried like i haven't cried in a very long time.  his birthday is coming up.  i have a lot of emotion pooling in me. and i saw photos of a beautiful baby girl who is fighting the fight, just beginning her journey. i saw a mama just beginning too. learning ropes no mom should ever have to learn.  god i remember every beep and alarm sending me into a f...

it's a word that I do not take lightly.  i have so very much to be thankful for as the years have passed along and i have learned a heightened sense of that for which i now find i was lost without prior. thank you paxton west. the boy that has brought so many people together in a way that i did not realize was possible. i came to understand through the big blue eyes of my little boy that amongst the chaos this world tends to hold anymore, that people can, will and do slow down to reach out to those in need. those fighting fights they didn't ask to fight, but do anyway.  for that ... i am grateful. thank you.  thank you dear friends who have donated to such a wonderful cause. i have been still in writing this post because sometimes i don't know how to say thank you in a way that expresses how much it means to me, to us.  a simple thank you doesn't do it justice. 1.) that you take timeout of your day to check in on our tiny little corner of the world, namely a...

I have been toggling back and forth on this post for quite awhile now.... Lately it's been eating at me a lot more than normal. I lay in bed at night and it comes over me.  All you moms of children with life threatening illnesses know what it is that I am speaking of.  It's all consuming.  The it , is that all consuming fear and worry.  One thought leads to another and the next thing you know you have devised a life changing catastrophe in your head.  None of mine have yet to see fruition, but I continue to let that abyss swallow me time and again.  Like a couple of weeks ago, when Paxton, who wanders into my bed every. single. night. of. the. week.  chose to sleep in his own bed all night and I awoke at 6 am reaching for him only to find that he was not there.  I immediately went there  in my mind. It went a little something like this... ...he didn't come into bed with me. something is wrong. is something really wrong jen or are you bei...

Hearts...hearts of all kinds, healthy, whole, broken, fixed, new and old are very near and dear to me.  I never really spent a lot of time studying just how freaking amazing that organ is until I had no choice. My baby boy...he's got a broken one.  Even three open  heart surgeries later, it's still broken, BUT it's still beating.   He is still here with us just about to turn 3 years old.  As with every birthday of his (and my other boys for that matter) I drop to my knees in gratitude for that. There were many days I didn't know that we would ever make it this far... There are many that don't make it this far.  I still spend many nights wondering why us...how does he choose...  My whole healthy heart is drawn to other families going through this journey and I feel the stories,  their gains and their losses to my very core. I silently cry for them, many that I don't even know personally, only through the heart community. That community I speak of,...

We have been busy little bees around here to say the least. So grab a cup of joe, or diet coke, or wine and settle in for a bit. It's a longy but goody ;)  We spent the last few weeks of Summer squeezing in what fun we could...ok and maybe I was a little manic counting down the days until I could squeeze in an hour of freedom.  Three, wild boys all Summer long definitely took it's toll on me. I am getting old after all. Come days end, I was s.p.e.n.t. We did a lot of swimming in our new pool and in true West fashion we go all out even then ; ) We are now into card and board games big time and as depicted below, I get very into it as well! We spend days outside running the property. Riding tractors, flying on our scooters. Getting boo boo's and jumping right back up so as not to miss a moment.  What I know for sure about this move from "Suburbia" to property is it is one of the single best choices we have made. It was a spur of the moment, one to...