Year in Review

Well, JayLyn and I were talking about this past year on our trip home from the holidays and decided that this year was definitely a year filled with some definite highs but also had some horrific lows as well. 2006 ended on a pretty good note with my little sister Stephanie receiving a liver transplant that she had been waiting for for a year and everything seemed to be going great with the transplant. Then on Jan. 21st she collapsed from a complication of the surgery, not the transplant which was doing amazing, she had developed a clot and it had freed itself and finally lodged itself in her lung. She was transported to Idaho Falls where she was stabilized and placed on Life Support until they could transfer her to Salt Lake where the transplant team was as well as the necessary medical equipment to take care of her. Once in Salt Lake it was determined that there was no higher brain activity. At that point we received the dreaded 12:30 am phone call in Cleveland. We were then on a plane at 8:00 that morning flying home to be with the family and to be with my sister for her last official few hours before she was taken off of life support. JayLyn and I spent a week with my family in Idaho for the funeral before we went back to our home in Cleveland.

After that we had some failed treatments with the infertility doctors that we had been seeing in Cleveland. My National Dental Boards came and went without any major complications, and then I was able to get all of my requirements finished for graduation, and I was finally able to land a job in Liberty Lake, WA. One week before graduation JayLyn underwent surgery for her endometriosis and all went well with the exception that we were told that there was no hope for us to be able to conceive naturally without In Vitro Fertilization procedures as JayLyn's tube was completely blocked off. It was some pretty harsh news that I don't think JayLyn fully understood the full weight of until we went to her post-op procedure on the day we were leaving Cleveland and moving to Post Falls, ID.

My brother Bill was able to present me with my diploma which was pretty cool.

Our move went fairly uneventful and as we were getting settled in Post Falls, we had plenty of time to get use to the area before I started working since I had to wait on my lincensure to come through. At the very end of June we received some of the best news that we had gotten the entire year. JayLyn was pregnant. We had defied the odds and after 5 years of trying, 2 surgeries and numerous infertility treatments, we had proven the doctors wrong and conceived naturally. Xander is due to enter the Scholes family on Feb. 22nd and we are very excited and are eagerly awaiting the day to meet him face to face.

These are his ultrasound pictures that were taken at 20 weeks, which happened to also be on JayLyn's birthday (Oct. 4th)

After that there really wasn't a whole lot that happened up until Sunday Dec. 30th. We were traveling home from visiting family for the holiday's when we were hit with a 50 -60 mph crosswind and that along with a sheet of black ice moved us from the left lane to the right lane of the freeway into the back of a Dodge truck that was slowing down for a semi pulling off the side of the road. After striking the dodge we then ricocheted into an older Ford car on the side of the road and glanced across their driver side door. Luckily no one was hurt with the exception of being a little sore. The other two vehicles sustained only a little damage and were able to drive away. We haven't heard yet but we are pretty sure they are going to consider our car totalled. Which we had only had for 5 months now and it only had 7000 miles on it. It was the first new car that we had ever bought. We ended up spending the night in Le Grande, OR at the hospital because we took JayLyn up there to get the baby checked out to make sure everything was fine and they decided to monitor her overnight. So after getting released from the hospital, having to get over to Pendleton to get a rental car and loading it up with all of our stuff we were bring home from the holidays we finally made it home to put 2007 behind us. We have much better hopes for 2008 because it sure can't get a whole lot worse than that (knock on wood).

I apologize for the long post and half of you probably quit reading by now, but it was very therapeutic for me to be able to write this whole thing out and get it down on "paper" and out of my head.