As many of you may know, Brett and I had quite the journey trying to get pregnant. We had our ups and downs for about a year and after one successful IVF attempt, Easter Sunday 2011, our life as we knew it had changed....we found out we were pregnant, expecting our little baby on New Year's Eve 2011! My entire life, I've dreamed of being a mom, my dreams were coming true. After the most normal pregnancy I could ask for, little Mr. Kellan Theodore was born. Just in case I haven't shared enough pictures of our good looking little guy....here's one more.
After getting over the biggest phobia of my life, absolutely dreading the hospital, I cried when we left because I grew to love it so much! That is where our little journey with Kellan started.
We brought him home and for the first 11 weeks of his life, he struggled to gain weight. Our Pediatrician was working to find out the reason for his poor weight gain, switching his formula every couple weeks, but to no avail could he find the answer. We ended up getting admitted to Children's on March 12th to figure out the problem as quickly as possible. After a day of being there, Kellan was diagnosed with 'failure to thrive,' due to a milk protein allergy. He was seen by several Doctors within that 4 day stay, but we thought we had found the answer.
One of the many Doctors he saw was a Genetics Doctor. Because of some extra skin on the back of his neck, the genetics Doctor wanted to run some tests to rule out any potential issues. At that time, I felt the tests were somewhat unneccessary, but we wanted to make sure we ruled out every possible reason for Kellan's failure to thrive diagnosis. Which brings me to what pushed me to start a blog.
The Genetics Doctor did find something in the tests that were ran. We found out that our little bug has a deletion on his chromosome 13, specifically q21 - q31. What does this mean for Kellan? He will have some level of a learning disability. The Dr's put it as mild mental retardation, but I feel like those words have a very scary rap to them. He will always be smaller (short stature), has a greater chance at developing cataracts and will have severe motor delay. The Dr's could only find 2 cases of other people with the exact same deletion, which make it very difficult to know exactly what to expect.
In one case, the little boy learned to crawl at age 3, learned to walk with assistance at age 5 and learned to walk on his own at age 10. I found other cases online where kids started to walk around 2. We have no idea what this will mean for Kellan, we can only hope and pray that God has a plan for our little bug. I have so many questions and mostly at this time I'm just angry that this has happened to us. I'm not really sure it has all set in at this point.
I want our friends and family to know that this is going on and figured this is a good way to keep everyone up to date. We of course will celebrate each one of his milestones. We know there are going to be bumps along the way. Brett and I love Kellan more than life itself and we are going to do our very best to create the best possible life we can for him.
We ask for your prayers. In times like this, I have a hard time finding the positives. I'm lucky to have Brett to balance me out in that part and we are so blessed to have really great families with lots of people that will love Kellan unconditionally. Not to mention lots of nieces and nephews that will always be there to be his friend and play with him and push him to be a stronger little boy. We are lucky to be blessed with some of the most amazing neighbors with lots of neighbor friends just waiting for him to get bigger so that he can play with them.
For those I have told before this blog, I thank you for all the loving and kind words of support and encouragement you have already given to us. For those of you just learning of this, I'm sure you are just as confused and have a million questions just like us. I will try to keep this blog updated with the things we learn and of course will keep you up to date on what is going on with our little bug.
He may be our little bug, but I know he has lots of big things to look forward to in his life.
