Hello everyone,

So I thought as a first post the best thing to do is start from the start. I am very much your average joe, I do not stand out like a sore thumb in a crowd and I try to keep myself to myself as much as possible. It could be said that I am not much of a people person.

I have 3 beautiful boys, Farley, Freddie and Fenton. I met my husband way back when in 2009 and Farley came along very quickly and made us a family. I learnt a lot and I grew up quickly. I made him the centre of my universe and all I wanted to do was make sure he had the best life he could possibly have. With that, when Farley was 2 nearly 3, I decided to go back to college to get some A-levels with the view of going to university. The first year of college went without a hitch, Farley started at nursery and I got on with what I had to do. But in August 2013 we found out about a certain someone and little did we know he was going to turn our world upside down. My due date was the end of March which was almost the end of my course, so I made the decision to carry on and finish my A-levels and all would be fine. But that vision quickly changed. After spending the run up to Christmas in hospital, making it home to see Farley open his presents on Christmas day and going back into hospital boxing day, Freddie came along on 2nd January 2014 11 weeks and 3 days early.

The next 6 weeks are a blur, he was a bundle of wires and tubes, everything was so new to us. We learnt just how much fight someone so little could have as we watched him take on life everyday and he won! at 6 weeks old he came home and we started to settle into normal family life. I made preparations to return to college and started to catch up with the work I had missed. Finally our lives started to get back to normal and we were so glad to see the back of the hospital, but Freddie wasn’t. 2 weeks after coming home I knew that something wasn’t right, he wasn’t eating properly, he wouldn’t settle and his belly looked big. We made the decision to take him back to hospital. By the time we got to the hospital he wouldn’t stop being sick and crying. After rushing him back to the neonatal unit and having various tests they found “something” on his x-ray but they didn’t know what. Through the night he got worse and by the morning he was back on a machine to help him breathe. Then he was transferred to Birmingham Children’s Hospital who were more specialised to hopefully find out what was wrong with him.

When we arrived at the paediatric intensive care unit in Birmingham Children’s Hospital we met a surgical consultant that said he thought he knew what was wrong but he would need to operate to find out for sure and fix the problem. But Freddie was so small he was still only 4lb we were told to prepare for the worst and we had to make the toughest decision ever. Let them operate and possibly lose him or leave him as he was and lose him anyway.

We stayed in parents accommodation that night, although we didn’t get much sleep and in the morning they were ready to operate. Our tiny baby took on life yet again and he won yet again. The outcome of surgery wasn’t the greatest though. Freddie had malrotation of the small bowel and a midgut volvulus which left him with only 40cm of small bowel. But he was alive!

Its been a very long road for us since then. After 8 months in hospital Freddie came home on TPN which required us feeding him through a central venous catheter at home. Its basically a bag of fat and a bag of sugar that goes straight into his heart. Without it he wouldn’t have been able to survive. They told us that he would never eat or drink but that was just something we would have to deal with.

Switch to now, countless hospital trips and 22 operations later, and Freddie has just has his central venous catheter removed as he no longer needs it. He is fed milk over night into a gastrostomy that goes straight into his belly and he eats and drinks in the day as normal. I completed my A-levels by distance learning although I ended up very delayed and I have just got into university. I’ve also just had another baby 7 weeks ago (Fenton)  who was 7 weeks early which they think was due to stress as my dad passed away suddenly at the start of October, he’s doing great now he’s just rather on the small side. I also started my own home based business called Flawless Belle Beauty 12 months ago and that is now booming.

So that is me and this is us. Until next time,

Kristy x