Surgery update #2

It is almost 8pm and I now know that my daughter's future will probably be as a professional wrestler. WOW!!!! Is she strong when she is MAD!!! Her surgery went wonderful. Better then we could have hoped for. Her palate is COMPLETELY closed and the surgeon was able to find the muscles in her palate and move them where they needed to be. Which means that we can anticipate her picking up her speach very well as her speach therapy continues. They wheeled her into us around 4pm and she looked so peaceful asleep in the crip. Then it happened. She woke up and turned into this incredibly strong child that would have rather scratched our eyes out then hug us. Oh my. Poor thing was in sooooo much pain. It took about 2 hours and three doses of morphine to finally get her to relax and sleep. She is in Marks arms now and I was able to get her to drink a little apple juice with a syringe. She gave me a smile and smuckered up to kiss me. I told Mark, "She's back". When Annabel gives you a kiss you know you have won her over. So as of now she is still in pain and will be for a couple of days. She has quite a bit of blood coming out her mouth and ears. But that will pass and she will heal. We have only our God in Heaven to thank for allowing the Surgeon to preform such a perfect surgery. He was nervous that he would not be able to close it completely and couldn't really give us a guarantee...but God took care of that. Now our job is to keep her arm restraints on and keep EVERYTHING out of her mouth for the next 4 weeks. It will be tough and I am sure I will have moments of stir craziness....but she is totally worth every bit of it. Thank you God for answering our prayers. Thank you for all of your prayers as well. I did listen to all the messages today on my cell phone but just haven't had a chance to return many of them. Please forgive me if I don't get back to everyone. But I appreciate so much knowing you are all thinking about and praying for Annabel. I will post again tomorrow. Tamara

Annabel is in surgery today

12:30 pm --- Annabel is in surgery right now to have her cleft palate repaired. She has been in there for about 2 1/2 hours. We have had two updates so far and things were great. She has her ear tubes in place and is a little less then half way through the palate repair. She did fantastic this morning considering we woke her up so early and she was not able to eat or drink. She only cried once and that was when they took her temperature. She was afraid of the doctors clothes. After that she was fine and when we said our goodbyes and she left in the arms of the doctor she was smiling. In fact she kept giving him kisses before she went to him. So I guess that was a good sign. He laughed about that. She should be done in about 2-3 more hours. I will post again after she comes out of recovery. God is so good to us as we have a great sense of peace about us right now. Thank you for prayers. Tamara