Annabelle's Blog: Annabelle is 5

Annabelle's birthday is celebrated the first 1/2 of December then we move on to Christmas. This past Friday we opened birthday presents from Brian's parents, brother and from us (my parents and brother gave her birthday gifts at Thanksgiving). She loved all the presents so much and enjoyed playing with them all weekend.

Saturday she received two special packages. One was from Brian's Aunt Winnie and Uncle Bill, it was a ride on horse that makes sounds which she loved and ran all around the house with. The second one was from her Sunshine buddy, a special match up of special needs kids and people with big hearts who want to bring some sunshine into their lives. Our family is amazing, they live in Mississippi and she has two girls, one who is Annabelle's age. They sent a big box of toys for Birthday / Christmas and it definitely brought sunshine to Annabelle. You can see the happiness in the pictures!

The final gift we received was finding out that Annabelle's running buddy, another amazing group of runners who are motivated by children with special needs and run for them, donated to PMG Awareness Organization in Annabelle's name. We are very involved with PMGA so this meant so very much to us! We hope to get to meet up with all of our PMG family someday but until then we continue to raise money for them. If you are interested in donating, you can at http://pmgawareness.org/donations/

We are still having some issues with the g-tube but are working through them with our GI team. Believe it or not she actually is gaining too much weight so we had to cut back her calories. She's gained over 6 pounds in under 2 months but hasn't gone up in height so we need that to catch up along with working on her muscle development.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas!!