Dear Family & Friends,

First of all we want to thank you for your continued prayers for Lorena's healing. The past days have gone so exceptionally well and our hopes were very high, perhaps too high. As she is after all still an omphalocele baby which in most cases take a lot of time before they are feeding properly.

Today an other omphalocele baby was dismissed out of the hospital but they have been here for two month already. On the other side of the hallway in the room opposite of us is and other baby with a similar case and he too has been here for more then 1 month already. In ICU they told us that they never had an omphalocele baby for about a year and then they had 6 in a row in recent months. This Alberta children's hospital does cover a large region in Canada for these cases, all of Alberta and a large part of B.C and Saskatchewan. According to the internet omphaloceles happens to 1 in 5000 to 7000 babies.

This morning when we called in they told us that she had been spitting up some of the bottles which were fed to her. So things were not going as well as we all had hoped. I also unfortunately do not have enough breast milk to keep her on only breast milk. The night feeds were Similac and during the day we mixed the breast milk with Similac just to have enough for her. When I gave her the midday bottle she spit up everything she had drank, about 30 ml. The rest (20 ml) was fed with the tube to her stomach again but even that she spit all up. This is of course cause for concern because she needs to get the nourishment to grow and be healthy. The next bottle she drank only 10 ml and then fell fast asleep and no matter how we tried she took no more. So again the rest of the bottle was tube fed and we were thankful this stayed in. The next bottle was the same situation again and the last bottle we tried to feed her before we went home she did not even want to wake up for at all. So this one too was fed through a tube again. Unfortunately this one too she spit up a whole lot of it. I took one attempt to try to nurse her a little today or at least introduce her to it but she became tired and frustrated and we decided to try again an other day as she is not even taking the bottles at this point. So I will not be staying here over night just yet. This was rather disappointing to me and Lorena throwing up her milk got my emotions going again. I guess I need to learn more patience. We will have to take it slow over the next days and hopefully she will bottle feed better soon. The days are so full for me between pumping for 45 min each 3 hours and trying mostly for an hour stretch to feed that bottle to her there just is not much time left. I am glad to get in a 30 min nap once a day as the nights too are exhausting with the pumping every 3 hours the stretches of sleep are about 2 hours time 3. It is amazing on how little sleep one can keep going when necessary.

The Alberta Children's hospital is a wonderful place for children as Janita and Jeremy are finding games, toys and computers to play with. Both kids were off again today but Jeremy will be going back to school tomorrow and Janita on Wednesday.  We found out that the hospital has a wonderful service where they deliver electronic greeting/mail to our room as we received one from friends in Zeeland, Netherlands. So if you would like to cheer up our day then feel free to send us one via the hospital's web site. 

We are currently living here in Calgary in a deep freeze with temperatures below -31 Celsius with extreme wind chill of -46.  Last night there were snow drifts all over the road when we came home.

We spoke to Dr. Eccles today and she said that if the feedings don't stay in they may have to feed smaller portions fortified with other nutrients. She also admitted that her spitting up is what all omphalecele babies do and even though she had hoped Lorena to be different because of her stomach not being as effected as much as other omphalocele babies we now see that she indeed will have the same struggles with keeping the milk in. Today she lost 10 grams.  We ask for your continued prayer as she still has a ways to go in the road to recovery.  Please pray that her feeds will stay in enough to nourish her and have her grow instead of loose weight. I know that after the operation people were relieved for Lorena to see a nice flat tummy however that was only the beginning of her healing now it is so important that she will keep her feeds down and be able to digest them rather then spit them all out again.

We are thankful however that she already has come such a long way. The Lord is good!

With Love
Lodewyk, Rena, Janita, Jeremy and Lorena