2009 Christmas Newsletter

Below is our Christmas letter for this year, without the pictures. If you'd like the version with pictures and we haven't e-mailed it to you soon, just let us know and we'll e-mail it ASAP! Thanks - Chad

Leslie and I are happy to be writing our third (I think) Christmas Newsletter together. Like everyone else, it’s been a busy and nerve-wracking year for us. But it’s been great too, and we hope that you enjoy hearing about it!

Little Miss Olivia

First, and truly foremost, Leslie and I were truly blessed to welcome little Miss Olivia Grace Stevens into our family in July.

I’ll be honest, most of this newsletter will focus solely on our little girl. If you don’t want to read about her, I suggest you either skip to the latter pages or just stop altogether.

Olivia truly is a little miracle. For those of you who are unaware of the circumstances surrounding her birth, here are the Cliff’s Notes…

Leslie and I found out during the last month of her pregnancy that Olivia had mysteriously stopped growing. After a series of tests and a lot of tears, it was determined that she had a “genetic abnormality” that wasn’t life threatening. The doctors took all of the necessary precautions and Olivia was born on July 20. Initially, they thought Olivia was a happy, but tiny, little girl. Our world was shattered the day after her birth, when a very “clinical” doctor (read: one with an absolute lack of bedside manner) told us he thought Olivia had Trisomy 18…very bad. Little ones with this genetic abnormality don’t usually last too long, about 2 weeks on average. For those of you thinking, “this is a Christmas letter, Chad…it’s supposed to be happy!”…just hang in there, it has a happy ending that I’ll get to right now.

It turns out this “diagnosis” was really just the doctor’s best guess and turned out to be wrong. We all cried A LOT, and I mean a lot, and rejoiced that our little girl was going to be OK! 57 days later, we brought her home and she’s been fat and happy ever since. Olivia has been doing great; her official diagnosis was a chromosomal deletion, which means part of one of her chromosomes “fell off.” What that means for her is a few thing – she’s far-sighted (no biggie), has a few, insignificant skeletal changes (no biggie) and has some hearing loss that we’ll continue to monitor. If you read one sentence in this entire news letter, please let it be the next one. Olivia is doing great and we love her with all of our hearts! She’s been an inspiration to a lot of the people who have met her, she’s so strong and such a fighter.

We’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who supported us at the hospital and continues to support us now. It was always nice to see people at the hospital and talk to those on the phone who couldn’t make it. I know one thing for sure, we lived a completely different life during Olivia’s time in the hospital…our biggest decision during the day was where we were going to eat lunch. Everything else was a constant – wake up, go to the hospital, stay until it was time to eat dinner, go home, eat dinner, sleep, repeat.

Because of Olivia’s courage and the great care she received from the neonatology team at Texas Children’s Hospital, Leslie and I established an endowment in Olivia’s name to help future little ones get the best care they can and give them the best chance to thrive! We’ve been truly blown away by the contributions we’ve received to the endowment already; a HUGE thank-you to everyone who has already contributed. If you are interested in Olivia’s endowment or would like to make a contribution, we’d encourage you to check out the link titled “The Olivia Grace Stevens Endowed Fund for Neonatology” on Olivia’s blog (I know, that sounds weird to me too). The link is… http://oliviastevens.blogspot.com.

The Rest – It’s true, it’s not that significant compared to Olivia’s Story.

Settling In to Our Home

We spent our first full year at our house in the Houston Heights, an area that we love more and more every day! We love taking the dogs running on all the nearby trails; it’s a little urban oasis and one of the few true neighborhoods anywhere near the inner loop in Houston.

We’ve loved getting to know some of our neighbors. We’re so lucky to have good people on both sides of us; Rod and Charlie and Dave and Kara couldn’t be better neighbors! Dave and Kara – thanks for everything this year, we’ve really enjoyed getting to hang out and all of the help you’ve given us! If anyone is looking for a delicious, calorie-filled and fat-rich dinner, just get in touch with Kara – she makes one heck of a fettucine, seafoody, cajuny pasta thing.

World Travels

Before Olivia was born, Leslie and I took a trip to Puerto Rico to just enjoy one last hurrah before our family grew by one. It seems like we all do this…one last something before a major event like graduation, a marriage or a baby. Either way, it was fun…we stayed in a great hotel that had a great casino in it that we actually won a nice little sum of money in. Nothing like a casino in your hotel as far as I’m concerned. (Author’s Note: I do realize there’s a whole city called Las Vegas dedicated to this principle.) Anyway, we had a great time exploring San Juan and the surrounding areas, and just spending some time relaxing at the hotel.

We took a few other trips as well; Leslie went to Prague for work and I was all over the place for work. This year I hit up Angola, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and Kazakhstan (a trip for which I missed watching the Steelers win the Super Bowl…)

Lots of Visits with Friends and Family

In all honesty, we didn’t travel as much as we have in the past few years, but we still managed to see a lot of family and friends. Of course, my parents came to meet little Miss Olivia after she was born.

We saw a lot of friends too: Milena spent a few days with us; Katie and Sabrina stopped by too! I managed to see some friends from Penn State, including a few trips to Mike’s in Chicago (shout out to Poochie at the Weiner Circle and my sista’ Biba) and some old friends from Houston – it was nice to see Melissa from my MBA program during a trip to NYC earlier in the year.

So we hope you have a great Christmas! We’ll leave you with one more picture of Olivia, one of the newest Nittany Lions!

Olivia's First Thanksgiving, a Trip Downtown, and Christmas Photos!

Thanksgiving 2009

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving this year--we had a lot to be thankful for! Chad and I hosted at our house for the first time ever...a little intimidating, but thanks to Chad's superior turkey cooking skills and my family members all pitching in, it went great and was a ton of fun. Lots of laughing, enjoying of wine, and passing around of Olivia from person to person--I don't think her feet ever touched the ground! It was also neat because it was actually last Thanksgiving when we broke the news to my family that I was pregnant, so how amazing to sit here exactly one year later with our little miracle Olivia as a beautiful four-month old baby. Here are some pics from the day:

Olivia in her "Baby's 1st Thanksgiving" onesie and matching hat (thanks to my dear friend Kimmy for giving this to Olivia!)

Olivia with her new orthopedic shoes (or her snowboard, as we call it), which recently replaced her casts. She pretty much hated it the first day she got it, but she quickly got used to it and hardly seems to notice it most of the time now. We get to take the bar and shoes off for 4 hours every day, so that is cherished time for us!

Olivia with her proud Daddy & Mommy

Honey with Olivia

Aunt Lisa and Ian with Olivia

Uncle Peter with Olivia (during some of her 4 hours of "no-snowboard" time!)

"Via Colori" Fundraiser in Downtown Houston
We took Olivia a couple weekends ago to a fundraising event called Via Colori, where hundreds of local artists come and create works of art in chalk on the streets of downtown. We went with Aunt Lisa and her boyfriend Ian, and we had a lot of fun. The event is held to raise money for the Center for Hearing and Speech, a wonderful school and speech therapy center in Houston that helps teach hearing impaired kids to listen and speak. Olivia is going to start doing weekly therapy at the Center, and we are really excited for her to start there as they do some pretty amazing stuff with the kids. We took her in recently for her hearing evaluation, a prerequisite for starting therapy with them. Obviously with a baby you can't do the standard hearing test you do with adults (sit in a sound booth and raise your hand every time you hear a sound), so it's much more based on watching the baby to see if they react to certain sounds. So the audiologist, Chad and I all watched Olivia very closely as the various tones and sounds were played while she was wearing her hearing aids, and it did seem that there were several times that she reacted specifically to a particular sound. Then the head of their speech therapy department assessed her next by presenting more sounds, and again she consistently responded when he would present the various sounds--we all saw it, and it seemed pretty crystal clear and way too consistent to be just coincidence. So we were thrilled, as this means that her hearing aids are actually helping her to hear better, which the audiologist at the hospital was not very optimistic that they would. We have a renewed motivation now to make sure that her hearing aids are in as much as possible every day (not an easy feat with a feisty baby who is very good at getting them out of her ears!)

Our Christmas Card Photo Shoot!
With Christmas coming up soon we decided recently that we needed to take a nice family photo to put on our Christmas card, so our very sweet friend and next door neighbor Kara agreed to come take some pictures of us. Kara brought her awesome camera and her keen eye for photography, and we think the results were great. Chad and I "dressed up" (hey, I wore makeup, which I've only done like four times since Olivia was born, so this was a big deal!) and we put Olivia in her beautiful Christmas dress from Gramma Mary. Olivia was such a champ through the whole session, not fussing at all and staying very alert for the camera. I think she knew how pretty she looked and was enjoying it! ;-) We took her various accessories off her face (glasses, nasal cannula), so you can actually see her whole beautiful little face, a rare treat for us. Here is the shot we chose for our cards, as well as some other cute candids Kara took.

Olivia sucking on Daddy's nose--she loves doing this with us and it feels SO cute!

Olivia sucking on something she loves even more than our noses...a lollipop! Again, my disclaimer is that her speech therapist told us to try this to stimulate her mouth, and we never give her more than a few licks at a time!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving as well and are getting as excited for Christmas as we are. Take care and keep in touch, and thanks for all the continued thoughts, prayers and well wishes for our sweet little girl...she is thriving and we are thrilled with her progress!