at last…

At last….I am finally writing to you from our home on Kauai! Maliyah is sleeping peacefully in the next room and we have just finished unpacking from our “trip”.

The last few days have been a blur as we once again joined the rest of the world. It was so nice to spend time with friends and to just do normal every day things. We even took Maliyah to the Honolulu Zoo! She had a blast, even though I think we might have pushed it a bit too much. After the zoo we had a bit of a scare. Maliyah had drank a lot of apple juice at the zoo due to it being pretty hot. I think it may have been too much too soon and she ended up vomiting it up later. This made us question whether we should indeed go home on Friday (today). After stressing about it all evening, and watching Maliyah very closely we decided to just take the leap to go home. I’m so glad we did.

We were a bit apprehensive about traveling with the rest of Maliyah’s supply of TPN and medications but TSA had us get in a special line and treated us really well as we breezed through security. We are still navigating Maliyah being on 17 hours of TPN and we ended up disconnecting her when her infusion was complete while we were in the terminal.

One of the most emotional moments happened after we landed. Paul Yoo had mentioned that the kids wanted to greet Maliyah at the airport, and upon reaching baggage claim, a large group of kids, parents, and friends from church were there to greet her. They brought leis, toys, balloons, flowers and stuffed animals for Maliyah. And for us they brought us several bags of home cooked food, a huge basket of fresh fruit and offered us a ride to where I had my truck parked.

To say it was emotional was an understatement. Everyone had shown up specifically to celebrate Maliyah coming home. We all kind of choked back tears as the stress of everything started to ease. We are home and truly blessed that all three of us made it. Thank you everyone for celebrating this happy moment with us. We are home with our little miracle.