This Is All New To Me...and why this Blog was created

Twenty-Fourteen has definitely been a year to remember!  Not only did we expand our family but we did it with every twist and turn possible, that is speaking from comparing our expansion from our first go around in 2011.
We started 2014 off like any other year, until we found out in February that we would be growing our little family of three to four.  So excited and yet oh so nervous to start all over again.  I mean we had a three year old, out of diapers and formula and was sleeping thru the night (almost on a regular basis)...a baby free house.  Plus I had the whole second Mother syndrome, how could I possible love another child as much as I love the one I have, how could I do this to our first and completely turn her little world upside down.  Saying all this out loud sounds worse than it sounded in my head almost a year ago but seemed more logical to me then, but of course now that we have our precious little baby there is no doubt that we made a great decision to have another baby and of course my heart CAN love another baby just as whole much as my first!
I'll flash forward to June (or backwards) when we were anxiously awaiting to find out what our little nugget was to be...a boy or a girl!  I had a feeling it was going to be another beautiful girl but I think secretly Daddy was hoping for a boy, and of course we found out we were having another beautiful GIRL!  This appointment was a BIG appointment for us and for our little girl, not only did we find out baby was a girl but we also found out that her little head was holding more fluid than normal... this is were the stress and emotions start and really have yet to stop!  We were immediately sent to a Perinatal Doctor for a more in depth look and that is when they made the diagnosis that our precious little baby girl had something called Hydrocephalus.  (If you Google, just a word of advice do not look at images... you will immediately shed some tears for those babies.)
Our emotions were wild after our appointment, especially because the first appointment with the specialist I had to have an amniocentesis and there were so many possibilities that could be placed upon our little baby that really are scary.  And the crazy thing is they do this test and you don't get the results for almost a month... talk about a very LONG month for this Mom and Dad.  We went back to the specialist and found out that we really had the best case of worst case scenario.  Baby Girl only had more fluid on her right side of her brain and there was nothing else to hinder her from growing in to a wonderful perfect little girl, we just had a small bump to cross once she was born and then to try to live as normal as possible there after.
So after a LOT of monitoring for the next 5 months we were finally blessed with our little Girl, Ms. Darcy May!  Once she was born she was lucky enough to be introduced to a wonder Neurology team that did take great care of her and is continuing to take great care of her.  When she was exactly two weeks old Darcy had to have a brain shunt placed into the right side of her little head, this was about an hour procedure and she was only in the hospital for twenty-four hours (the longest day of Me and Eric's life).  Now I know first hand what it means when people say it is harder on the parents than the child, as she was a trooper thru it all and I was an emotional wreck!  If it weren't for my husband and the wonderful staff at the hospital I'm pretty sure I'd still be sobbing.

.  Our sweet baby right after surgery

 Small bump is the shunt

So I started this post at the beginning of 2014 and here it is the already the end of 2014 and so much has happened with our family.  I decided to try this whole "blog" thing in hopes to shed some light on our journey with Hydrocephalus (as well as keep our close friends and family up to date).  Our little girl is a rather normal case and so far has no other complications, which when I went searching for stories like ours there wasn't many to read.  That then scared me more because I wasn't sure we would have such a normal situation, but then after talking more to the Neurologist and our Pediatrician I know that there are more people out there with SHUNTS that live a perfectly normal life.