So we put together this fun file folder game, and the twins played it today. They are slowly learning the names of the pieces of armor. I will have them play it a few more times, so they’ll learn them better. They know one of them really well already – the Sword of the Spirit!
I always want birthday parties to be special. We have so many that sometimes it feels blasè. But when the time approaches, I start to get that rush of adrenaline that I need to pull off a fun, exciting party for the honored one. This time it was our baby’s turn. She turned 2. She acts older than she is, so it seems appropriate that she would be that old. She is one of the most loquacious babies we have had yet.
Her oldest brother prayed a blessing over her.
She liked seeing a picture of herself on her cake.
She got some help from big sister in blowing out the candles. They did great! They had them blown out before my camera would snap the picture!
She actually let Anna put her hair up and make it fancy.
She didn’t need much help opening presents this year.
Another musician!
And all the girls love My Little Ponies.
We all enjoyed the strawberry cake with 7-up and strawberry jello poured over it and then sweetened strawberries on top and then cool whip on top of that. Yum yum!
This is her birthday door! She even got a card from Evangelist Kumar in India!
So we had another big, exciting family birthday party. All it takes is a birthday cake (made by Mommy), balloons, a few presents, candles, everybody singing happy birthday, lots of pictures being taken, and brothers and sisters and Mommy and Daddy paying extra special attention to the honored one. Some of the kids like to dress up a little. But mostly, we just try to make the birthday child feel special.
It is a little more difficult to do this when we celebrate our January birthdays. Since we have 5 of them! But we’ve always been able to pull it off somehow.
A feat of balance and engineering! Think about it, this must have been difficult to do. Arthrogryposis did not stop him from developing good fine motor skills and carrying out the ideas he sees in his mind. I’m so thankful for what the Lord has done for Patrick.
But Patrick was not the only one building with blocks this week. Garrett was inspired to build a very interesting diamond castle. He tells us about it here:
And the kids have been playing some vintage Mario games together. It is very interactive and engaging. They read together and enjoy the story line. They share a fun bonding time.
I’m happy that they like to hang out together. Not every family does. We have had some people try to lure our kids out by trying to make them feel like they should hate being stuck in a big family. Planting some pretty poisonous seeds. But we have come through that threat and all of the children are content again with our big, happy family – warts and all.
When I first had Patrick, I was told to check out a support group for parents of children with arthrogryposis. It was anything but encouraging. I only read a few issues of their newsletter and then stopped looking at them. But here is how some children are affected by it.
A gorgeous little baby girl with arthrogryposis
Some are unable to walk or run.
As I was doing research for this article, I found some other pictures online that were extremely disturbing, with bodies twisted out of all alignment and grossly misshapen body parts, but I believe that most people with Arthrogryposis are more like the way Patrick was.
The support group didn’t show those kinds of pictures, but the stories were not encouraging to me, because they told of many surgeries and lots of intervention and time in hospitals and doctors’ offices. That was not the kind of life I wanted for Patrick or my family. I prayed that God would just heal Patrick sovereignly.
One night, I was putting pictures in photo albums. It was kind of strange that I was doing it. I was way behind and felt like it was more than I could handle. I didn’t even know about scrapbooking back then, but there’s no way I could have done any of that. Just putting pictures in albums was a chore. There was so much going on in my life. It got very late, and everybody else was in bed. The house was nice and quiet, and I was getting tired. I kept thinking, “What am I doing? I should be sleeping while I have the chance.” But I kept working at my photo album. Finally, I told myself I was being foolish, and I just needed to go to bed and get the rest I needed. I walked from the kitchen through the living room where the tv was on. I was walking past the television when I heard Benny Hinn say, “The parents of Patrick should listen to this.” I stopped and stared at the tv. Benny started quoting some verses about how God takes care of his children. I sat down and listened as intently as I could. I was trying to memorize what he was saying. I knew that he was saying it to me. I remembered two of the verses.
Psalm 34:19 Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all.
The other was really similar:
Psalm 34:17 The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.
I was just sitting there soaking in what the Lord was saying to me. Then I was shocked to hear Benny Hinn say these words:
“Patrick is going to be fine.”
I knew that the Lord had just given me a promise.
I hung on to that promise and let the Lord lead me into a more “believing for the supernatural, less dependent on medical professionals” lifestyle.
When Patrick was 2 1/2 and 3 years old we went to a church with a little boy named Reggie who was about Patrick’s age who also had arthrogryposis. He was more severely affected by it. His wrists were bent like the wrists of the baby in the first picture above. He couldn’t straighten them out to hold a cup or get food to his mouth or anything. He needed help with everything. He had a really hard time walking, too. In fact he couldn’t walk when we first met him. He didn’t start walking until he was over 2 years old. Patrick had started right around 1 year old.
I was amazed that there were 2 boys in the same church with this condition. It is very rare – only 1 in 3000 births. And they were close to the same age. I talked with the mother. I asked if she had taken thyroid medication, because I wondered if that was what had caused Patrick’s condition. She hadn’t. She told me that Reggie was going to have surgery to straighten his wrists so that they would be stuck in a straight-out position instead of a bent position. The joints would be frozen, but he would be able to do more that way than he could with them hooked in the way they were. We felt so bad for him. We prayed for him a lot. Patrick saw how badly it could have affected him, and he became more thankful for what he had.
One thing that Patrick struggled with was breathing difficulties. He would run around and get all excited, and then he would come in struggling to breathe. One time, he was having such a hard time, he just laid on the couch and tried to get some breath. He was heaving, and I could tell he was trying to talk, but he couldn’t. I knew it was serious, so I took him to a pediatrician. She gave him 2 breathing treatments and then sent him to the hospital. They diagnosed him with asthma. But we never claimed it. I got a breathing treatment machine. We got him an inhaler. We used these things when he needed them, but we never said that Patrick had asthma.
During our travels across the country, we didn’t have the machine or inhaler. Patrick didn’t have any breathing problems. When we settled in Kansas City, he had some problems, but he experimented with sleeping in different parts of the house and found that he was okay if he slept in the basement. We never had to take him to the doctor because of breathing problems while we lived there. The rest of us seemed to have more problems than he did! In the last couple of years, he hasn’t had any breathing problems at all.
His club foot did start to turn in after the first surgery. He started to walk on the outside of his foot. It became more noticeable all the time. A Shriner saw him walking on the side of his foot and talked to Gary about doctors they had that would fix his foot for free if he went to their hospital. I was very uncomfortable about doing anything with the Masons, so I didn’t pursue it. I was trusting God to take care of his foot. The Shriner, Carl, started coming to our house and persisted in trying to convince me to send Patrick to their hospital and have him operated on. I politely refused. He started harassing me and telling me that Patrick would hate me some day for not taking care of his foot. He said that the things I had heard about the Masons were all false. He kept coming by and pestering me. It was really disturbing. But he came while Gary was at work, and I didn’t want to be rude to him. He stayed for an hour or more each time telling me all the wonderful things the Shriners do.
I started praying about Patrick’s foot more diligently. We took him to a church and asked everyone to pray for his foot to turn. We told the Lord that if He didn’t heal it by a certain date, we were going to take him back to the orthopedic surgeon and have him operate on it. The foot didn’t turn, so we did end up having the surgery. Patrick had a total of 5 surgeries on his foot and on the hypospadias by the time he was 6 years old. He has never had any other surgery since then. He never had anything done to his elbows, muscles, tendons or anything else.
The summer before that, he played soccer. He did really well, even with his foot turning in. And everybody loved Patrick. At one of the first practices, we were pulling up to the field, and I started hearing kids yelling, “There’s Patrick. Patrick’s here!” I couldn’t believe it. I think there had only been one practice before that, and he was homeschooled so he didn’t know anybody from school or anything. He has always been very popular everywhere we go.
A geneticist told us that it was not likely that any of our future children would have arthrogryposis. I prayed really hard about this because I wanted another child. Our plan had been to have four children, but I was unsure about whether I should have more if they might have birth defects. I went to a woman from church who had five kids and asked her how she felt about birth control and having many children. She and her husband used natural family planning. She knew when she was fertile, and they decided when they wanted to try to have a child or when they wanted to keep from getting pregnant. I heard more about this method on Focus on the Family later. I liked this method much better than birth control pills.
God took me even further and asked me to let Him be Lord of my womb. He showed me that people-making is really His business, not mine. If He wants to put a child in my family, I should not stand in His way. He knows what children are supposed to be in my family. I don’t. By trying to control that, I was meddling in His affairs! So I have let Him do His will in that area, and He has blessed us abundantly above all that we could ask or think, with 10 children. And none of them have any physical problems at all. And Patrick has been gradually healed from the moment we first found out that he had any problems.
We have been able to live life as a family at home, not in doctors’ offices or hospitals. I am so thankful for the wonderful blessings that God has bestowed on us.
The first part of this testimony is here if you would like to read it.
Patrick is our miracle child. When I was pregnant with him, I had an ultrasound that appeared normal. We couldn’t see anything wrong with him at all. After he was born, they saw that he had one club foot. They didn’t tell me right away, but they told Gary about it in the nursery. I just had a feeling, so I asked him if everything was all right with his body. He told me about the club foot. I was upset, but he said the nurses told him that an orthopedist would wrap the foot several times since he would grow so fast, and I would have to soak off several casts, but the foot would straighten after we did this and everything would be fine. I was still disappointed that there was anything wrong with my baby, but I wasn’t terribly distraught. The next morning my ob-gyn came in to do the circumcision. He came rushing into my room and blurted out, “I’m not going to do a circumcision on your baby!” I was taken aback. He looked like he was frightened and worried. I wondered what could make him react that way. Was my baby some kind of monster or something? I asked why and he got a piece of paper and started drawing a picture of the male part and where the hole is supposed to be and where the hole was on my baby’s. He then explained that he was leaving the foreskin intact so that a surgeon later on could use it to reconstruct and put the hole where it was supposed to be. I couldn’t believe all of this was happening to MY baby. And then he said, “There’s something else…” I was afraid to ask what that could be.
He said that my baby couldn’t move his arms. He said that for some reason he didn’t move his arms in the womb and they didn’t grow right, so that he couldn’t bend them at the elbows and he couldn’t move them much at all. That did it. I started crying. He gave me a hug. Then he just got up and walked away. I was alone. I didn’t have anybody to share my grief with. Gary had taken our other two children home and was there with them. I called him to tell him the news I had just received. When he answered he told me that both of the kids were sick and so was he. I went ahead and told him and cried, and he was stunned. He couldn’t say anything. I think he got ten times sicker when I gave him the news. I told him I needed him to come. He didn’t know if he could. What about the kids? I about got hysterical on him. He said he would get Mom to watch the kids and come as soon as he could. I called Mom and told her what was happening. She started praying for his healing right then and there. I got up and took a shower and cried and asked God why he let this happen to my baby. I was very careful when I was pregnant. I never took any kind of medicine except thyroid medicine that the doctor insisted that I take. I couldn’t understand how God would let something like this happen to me when I had always been faithful to Him. I have always served Him and loved Him and kept Him at the center of my life from the time I was a young girl. I had a good cry, and then the Lord started to fill my heart with faith. I started proclaiming that I would believe for Patrick’s healing and that God would be glorified through this testimony of His healing power.
Word got around among the people in our church, and the pastor and his wife came to see me and several other people did, too. Gary finally got there, and he looked awful. He was sick in body and soul. He just collapsed in a chair and didn’t say much or move at all. He was too miserable to even try to comfort me. Nobody knew what to do for him. The friends from church tried to comfort me with words of sympathy and offers of help. I started proclaiming to them that God was going to heal Patrick, and that God was going to use him to show His power and that I was willing to be used in that way. They looked at me kind of skeptically, and I could tell that they felt sorry for me and thought I was going off the deep end. But I knew what I was saying, and I knew that God was going to heal him.
A pediatrician came to talk to me and told me all of the terrible possibilities for my son. She told me that he had something called arthrogryposis. She said that I would become intimately acquainted with a physical therapist and an orthopedist. She said that Patrick may never be able to walk or feed himself or take care of his own grooming. She gave me the most doom and gloom scenario possible. I wanted to throw her out the window. Later, she gave me even more reason to want to do that.
She told me I had to bring him to her office the day after I brought him home from the hospital for PKU and other things. My mom was so discombobulated that she didn’t think about me driving so soon after delivering a baby, so she stayed at my house with my other 2 kids, and I drove Patrick to the doctor myself. Nobody was thinking too clearly right then. At my first appointment in her office, this lovely pediatrician told me which immunizations I needed to give my baby. I told her that I didn’t do immunizations any more after researching it and coming to the conclusion that the possible side effects were worse than taking the chance of ever contracting the diseases. She looked at me with the most patronizing look and said that the next time I came in she would sit me down and give me a good talking-to about the benefits of immunization. At a time like that when I was so concerned about my baby and this condition called arthrogryposis and what that was going to mean for Patrick and for me, she wanted to sit me down and lecture me about shots! I couldn’t believe her insensitivity.
I did what they told me to do, apart from the shots. I took Patrick to the orthopedist. They wrapped his foot every week. I had to soak the cast off and take him back for a new one every week for the first 6 weeks of Patrick’s life. Then Dr. Albert did surgery on him and did his best to straighten the foot and loosen the heel cord. He told me after the surgery that normally that would take care of a foot like that, but the arthrogryposis might cause complications. He said that the fibrous tissue made it hard to do the cutting that he needed to do but that he did his best and we would have to wait and see how it turned out.
They also told me that I had to take him to an occupational therapist to help him bend his elbows and move his arms. The occupational therapist was another one whose bedside manner seemed to have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. She tried to force me to do things with him like feed him solid food before I judged that he was ready for it because she wanted him to have motivation to put his hand to his mouth. She really was trying to get him to do things that he needed to do, but she had no regard for my opinions or desires for my child. She acted like my other two children were a nuisance and didn’t want me to bring them to the appointments. I was already having to leave them way more often than I wanted to, and I wasn’t going to make them feel like they didn’t matter or that Patrick was going to get all the attention from now on and they were just pushed aside. So I brought them anyway.
I had to fight the hospital people all the time. They didn’t like my ways of doing things, but I didn’t like theirs, either. I nursed Patrick, so he didn’t take a bottle. The therapist wanted me to have him take a bottle so that he would have to bend his elbows to feed himself. Not happening. I nurse all my babies. We just had to find other ways to get him to put his hands to his mouth. I knew that God was healing him all along, too. I wasn’t scared that he was not going to make the proper progress before it was too late, because I knew that with God, all things are possible. She tried lots of different things and taught me how to bend his elbows and supinate them, and I did therapy on him at home. At one appointment she said she thought he had plateaued on the range of motion of his elbows. She didn’t think he was going to make any more gains. He was at about 90° with his right elbow and a little less with his left. I was glad to hear that. I wasn’t going to take him to any more appointments with those rude, pushy people. I was going to continue doing therapy on him myself and praying for a complete healing for him. We had people at lots of different churches praying for him. We prayed for him every day.
He was the sweetest, happiest baby I ever saw. When he was in the hospital for one of the surgeries, I felt so bad for him. He just took everything in stride. He didn’t deserve any of this. After the first surgery on his foot, he spiked a really high fever after I took him home. I took him to the pediatrician right away. They got the fever down. They told me I had to bring him back in two days. After he was home, he was fine. I knew he was fine, so I called and canceled the appointment. That pediatrician called me and said that I HAD to bring him in to be seen, no matter what. I took him, but it was very inconvenient and unnecessary, and I was very unhappy about it. When I took him into the examining room, she could tell by looking at him that he was fine. She said, “Oh, he’s a different child!” I thought she meant I had brought another child to her. I was still not thinking too clearly at that point. But I was so indignant that she would never trust my judgment about anything.
Needless to say, I changed pediatricians after that. I don’t have much use for them any more. I know when my child is sick, and I know how to treat them. I know that I don’t have to rush them to an expert every time they have a sniffle. My husband is a really good “Dr. Daddy”. We only go to the doctor when something hangs on for a long time and we just can’t beat it, or something is out of our league. We trust the Lord to take care of us and keep us well, and He has. We pray for each other for healing when we get sick, and the Lord heals us.
Patrick was a little daredevil from the time he could crawl. He would often sit in a little chair, then stand up and just drop straight down to the floor. With his arm and elbow problems, I was always afraid he would land on his face. But he caught himself with his arms every time. He learned to do all of the developmental milestones right on time. He learned to ride a bike at a younger age than my other kids did. Not only that, he did stunts! He was an amazing little guy. He compensated for the lack of range of motion of his elbows and fed himself, combed his hair, brushed his teeth, and did everything else he needed to do. He didn’t even know there was anything different about him. I was glad I could homeschool him, because he didn’t have to be exposed to insensitive questions from other kids or adults very often. He grew up like any normal kid. Because he was a normal kid, and he is a normal person.
He did start to notice as he got older that things were really heavy for him, and he had a hard time lifting them. That bothered him. Last year, he started going to the YMCA and doing some weight training with his dad and brother. He is developing some nice biceps (which the doctor said he didn’t have much of) and triceps and whatever other muscles you have in the upper arms. His forearms were already built up because he used them a lot throughout his life. Then he started working with a Bo staff. I wondered how he would do with that. I am amazed at how well he can swing it around. He has even more flexibility in his elbows than he used to have. He is getting more strength and building bigger muscles all the time. And God is healing him more and more. He has done a gradual healing of Patrick’s body.
He is far from handicapped, and God gets all the glory for it. The dire predictions of that pediatrician did not come to pass. Patrick knows Who has healed Him, and now he is getting to know His Healer personally.
I videotaped Patrick working his Bo staff. If it looks like it’s in slow motion, it won’t show the impressiveness of what he can do. When I first uploaded it, the staff moved so fast that it looked like he was swinging eight or more staffs. I don’t know if the bandwidth affects the speed, but believe me, he swings that thing fast! I hope it works at the right speed for you, so that you can be awed by what the Lord has done for my son. Try to watch it at a time of day when the Internet is not very busy, and maybe you’ll be able to see what he can really do.
He learned how to wield this staff by reading a book!
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Mother and Child
"Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is placed in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no other's hands the sacred and holy trust given to her." -JR Miller
"Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is placed in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no other's hands the sacred and holy trust given to her." -JR Miller
