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!