5 Putnals: ~~~Visiting with our nurses~~~

What an amazing day! We spent Saturday in Macon with our NNICU family. The annual Preemie party was a wonderful opportunity to visit with those who took such great care of our little miracle baby. Of course, they were all amazed at how well he has progressed since those very, very dark days in the beginning.

Once we left the party, we SHOPPED like I haven't shopped since before all of these surgeries began. The girls needed new clothes for the cooler weather....imagine that. Ha! We had dinner with great friends before coming home. We left at 9:25 Saturday morning and got home at 9:00 that night. LONG day, but VERY productive. Reed has a costume for Halloween, girls have fall clothes, I have a pair of jeans and a couple of tops, and Reed has some pjs for the cooler weather. All in all, a very productive MOST ENJOYABLE day with my little family.

Of course, I have pics. These are his 18 months pics we had done in September. I got my grandparents and my babies to document the three great-grandchildren with their great-grandparents. Reed even rode the tractor with Granddaddy. :) He loved playing in the freshly dug peanut plants.

In spite of all the surgeries I have ended up having, life is still GOOD. God has blessed us so abundantly and beyond our imaginations. I am thankful for every day He gives me with little family of five. There have been some very hard days since all of these surgeries started in May, but I can always go back to the fact that IT CAN ALWAYS BE WORSE. Having gone through what we did with Reed, these roadblocks called surgery are NOTHING compared to the battle we fought for Reed's life.

I challenge you, as we enter our holiday season, to focus on the blessings rather than the roadblocks. We can talk all day about everything that is wrong in our lives.....and we get no where. If we praise Him for all of our blessings, you will see the blessings FAR outweigh the roadblocks. Remember the roadblocks are there to help us learn something....even though we may not be able to figure out what lesson we need to learn in the midst of the storm. Looking back on the events of our lives in the last 2 years, I have seen so many lessons God has taught me. Take time as a family to count your blessings and thank Him for every one of them. Tomorrow is not promised, and those blessings can disappear in the blink of an eye. Enjoy what you have while you have it, for tomorrow it may be gone.