Rain

    I have often heard the saying, “Into everyone's life a little rain must fall”. Rain falls on all of us. We sometimes hate rain when it soaks us in unrelenting sheets of wet and cold. But without rain the flowers wouldn't grow. So rain it will, on all of us. My hope with the rain is that there will always come growth along with it. It was no exception with my oldest son Adam. In fact the rain came even before he was born.
    Winn and I got married as poor college students. I quit school to work and Winn worked and went to school. With the costs of school, apartment rent, food, etc, we decided to wait until after Winn graduated to have children. We had the perfect plan. Until....after two months of marriage, I decided I desperately wanted a baby. I could not stop thinking about it. I told Winn I had faith that everything would be OK if we had a baby while he was still in school. I felt peaceful with that thought. Winn resisted but eventually weakened to my sad eyes and my deep desire to be a Mother. After being married for 5 months I became pregnant. I was very excited.

    Then the rain started. I got morning sickness to the extreme and I threw up at even the smell of food. I threw up all day. I couldn't keep anything down. It was rough. I even found myself cleaning throw-up out of the carpet at the store I worked at, on my hands and knees, with customers looking on in pity. I threw up so often that I was light-headed all the time and I passed out a few times. I was losing weight instead of gaining it like I was supposed to. I prayed in my daily prayers for 2 things, that the times I passed out I would not hurt this baby in my fall and that the baby would get enough nourishment to grow and develop the way that he should. I survived the pregnancy but in the end I only gained 4 pounds instead of the 30 my doctor recommended. I lost a lot of weight but the baby grew well, although he was 2 weeks late. The 9 and a half months was brutal but I knew it would be worth it.

Thanksgiving and I'm overdo, hoping for the baby to come soon.

    My water broke one night and we went to the hospital. I was in labor all day but I was not progressing, even with an IV to help speed things up. They prepped me for a c-section because there is a risk to the baby once the water breaks, if labor does not progress after a long period of time. We prayed surgery would not be necessary because we had no insurance or enough money for a surgery. At the last minute my body went to work and I was able to have him in the traditional way. We welcomed a healthy baby boy and we named him Adam. Winn had to sell his motorcycle to pay the hospital bill. I considered this a big blessing because Winn drove too fast and kept crashing and hurting himself. I got a discount on the delivery at the hospital where my mother and I worked labor and delivery. I also got a discount from the doctor, who knew my mother and I. Winn got government grant money when we needed it most. We were blessed and I knew my prayers had been answered and we were supposed to have this baby boy in our lives at this time. He was a fun baby. He added a lot to our lives and made us want to be better people because we loved him so much.

Adam's Dad deeply loved his little boy

He had a smile that melted our hearts

This is what we got to wake up to every morning

4 generations

Winn graduated and we didn't starve to death

    We moved to Arizona after Winn graduated and lived in Phoenix and then Tucson. Adam was a fun little boy. We had mostly happy days but there was some rain. The tough times Adam went through he handled very well. Because it was so hot, reaching 118 degrees while we lived there, he was forever taking off his clothes. I don't blame him. I wished a few times I could have done it myself. One of the tough times happened when he ran into the neighbor's yard and grabbed a cactus. A lot of people had cactus gardens instead of flower gardens because they grew better in the Arizona heat. The horrible thing about the cholla cactus he grabbed was that it has hooks on the ends so when they go into your skin you can't pull them back out. They hook inside your skin like a fish hook in a fish. If you try to pull them the skin pulls with it and they just can't be pulled out. My husband, who was watching Adam, grabbed him and also got some cactus in him. Adam kept rubbing his sore hands on his stomach embedding more in his stomach. It was a long miserable ordeal. Most of the quills had to be trimmed to the surface of the skin because they could not be pulled out. They got infected and were sore for a long time. We felt really bad for Adam as he tried to recover. Winn had a rough time too.

We added a daughter while we lived in Arizona

Kids and cactus don't mix

    We had a lot of bugs of all kinds In Arizona, another thing to keep Adam safe from. We had taranchulas, beetles with huge pincers, black widows, scorpions, etc. Adam loved being outside and spent a lot of time exploring and playing in the dirt. He got covered in fire-ant bites quite a few times, which left welts all up his legs. Another time while crawling he almost grabbed a huge beetle that could have done some serious damage. The scorpions were the same color as our carpet. He had a lot of close calls with those, which are harder on children. I stepped on one one evening with my bare foot and jumped back just as its stinger stuck forward for my leg. Black widows were everywhere. I got bitten by one and my arm swelled up twice its size with red streaks. It was hard to keep this crawling baby safe from harm in the land of plentiful bugs. The only good thing was that he grew up not afraid of harmless bugs and he would catch cockroaches by the dozens in our house and go throw them outside. We would bug bomb our house but in no time the bugs would all move back in. 

    It was a miracle he was never bitten by anything besides the ants. Another miracle happened when I was busy doing dishes in the house and Adam had been busy playing with toys in his room. I got a sudden panicky feeling and ran out to our washroom, directed by a Heavenly force that helped me know something was wrong and where to go. I found Adam, who had climbed up on some bricks and was about to drink some Clorox bleach he had knocked off the shelf. It made me thankful I prayed for his safety every day.

Adam and his sister Katie. They both hated wearing
clothes when it was so hot.

Stretching with this Dad

    We moved to Colorado when Adam was 4 years old. He had more bad things that happened to him here. His best friend hit him hard accidentally in the face with a golf club just missing his eye.

     Another time Brett was riding his bike and fell and cut open his chin. It was a big cut and he was bleeding all over. Adam was there to help him in the house. I had a new baby who was asleep at the time and other children who had been throwing up all morning. I knew Brett needed stitches and I couldn't find a babysitter. I knelt and prayed for help. I called up Pauline Jensen and asked her if any of her daughters could watch my children. She told me they couldn't but she would be right over. She was the answer to my prayer. Brett got his chin sewed up and I didn't have to worry over my sick children. Pauline is one of my heroes. I was also thankful Adam was there to help out. Another time I was at a friend's house and our children were playing with each other. All of a sudden we heard screaming and we rushed in to find Adam on the ground with blood spurting out of the back of his head like a drinking fountain. Adam and his friend had been wrestling and Adam fell into the corner of their brick fireplace, breaking the bricks and cutting open the back of his head. My friend wanted to call an ambulance. We lived so close to my doctor's office I felt like I could drive him there faster than an ambulance could get here. My friend watched my children and I took Adam to our doctor's office. He was holding a towel on his head. His blood soaked through the towel. It started to rain outside. I got him out of the car and he was so weak from loss of blood that he couldn't stand up. I picked him up and ran inside with him. We were both covered in blood. My doctor's office was locked when I got there. I prayed and felt I should go to the pharmacy in the same building. I went down there. We were a sight, soaked from the rain, my shirt covered in blood and this weak pale boy bleeding from his head. The pharmacist called for emergency help. It happened to be the office building's annual party so all the offices had shut down for a couple of hours. The doctor came immediately and cleaned pieces of broken brick out of his head and had a hard time sewing him up because he was bleeding so much he could not see to sew him up because the blood kept pooling up. Adam was kept for a while and given a lot of fluids to make sure he didn't need a blood transfusion. He had a bad headache for a few days and slept a lot.

Smiles before they got really sick. I have already written about our family's
ordeal with chicken pox in my first chapter. I felt bad when I was in the
 hospital with Brett and Adam didn't get as much attention when he had
them so bad in his eye lids. 

He is very flexible. Maybe this is why he never broke any bones.

    Like I have said in my previous chapters, our children have been through a lot. I feel like it does make them tough kids, gives them compassion for others going through hard times and it gives us their parents a chance to see the depth of our love for each one of our children. Fear for that child makes us access just how much that child means to us and how horrible life would be without them. I am thankful for Adam. He showed a lot of calm and bravery in the things that happened to him. At the time, when he was still a child I had no idea what other big events would happen in his life that would affect all of us and make us even more grateful for him. I will save that for one of my next chapter.

Adam was very sweet with his grandpa who had Alzheimers 

I am also grateful for the love he showed for his younger
brothers and sisters

Rocking Haley when she is sick

Adam was always the cool brother the other kids wanted to be like