A Quick Trip to Orlando

It's amazing how life can change in one moment. For our friend Jenna, she went from playing in the pool to spending 8 days in the hospital. Emma Grace and Jenna have been friends from the womb and have remained friends despite living far away. Jenna was playing at a friend's pool when she fell in and hit her head on the side of the pool on the way down. She had a blood clot in her brain. Of course we panicked right along with Matt and Susan since it could've easily happened to our child and Jenna's like a daughter to us. When we heard that Jenna was in trouble, we had to do something. Jenna had two requests: 1. I want to go home. 2. I want Emma to visit me. We couldn't do anything about getting her home, but we could made the trip to Florida. God worked all the details out for us. EG's teacher, Mrs. Roan and her school were more than accommodating to her absence even though we didn't have any more absences to use. My grandparents kept Will and people from Matt and Sue's church provided a wonderful place for us to stay so that we could be close to the hospital and not have to make the trip back and forth from Grandma and Grandpa's house. It was very hard to see tiny Jenna in that ICU bed with all the wires, tubes, and monitors . Matt and Sue were so strong and calm. I can't tell you what a blessing it was to see the girls together. I've been blessed with life-long friends and it brought tears to my eyes to see EG getting to experience it. They watched movies, talked about books and barbies and EG's birthday party. They even sang along with the music therapist. We hated to have to be there for this reason, but EG and I were glad to spend time with such great friends.

The girls played an intense game of UNO (Jenna won), and EG plays some outdoor xylophone for her friend. Obviously the Yanni music is working to relax Jenna.

It was hard to leave them, but it was good to be able to leave Jenna with a smile on her face. Emma Grace has shown us how compassionate and gentle she can be and how special and precious those first friendships are. Jenna was released after 8 long days and continues to improve. They're moving to Tampa this week for Matt to be an Associate pastor at a church there. We'll try to give updates when we have them. We'll see them this summer at some point and I'll be happy to post pictures of busy little girls running around and swimming together instead of being stuck in a hospital!