



The next week was hard on both of us. I was still struggling with my feelings of wanting to be in Alaska, while we had 7 kids all 7 and under running around the house. Emotions were running high. As much as the kids all love and adore each other, being stuck in a house for days on end was wearing on them as it was with Kirsten and I. (We also were “blessed” with a major snow storm that left us home bound. And resulted in our van getting stuck in the drive way several times. Thankfully I had some guardian angels watching over me who came to shovel our drive way and walks several times.) There were silly little arguments and fights happening all over the place, but every night when it was calm and quiet, I would get lost in my thoughts and the darkness would start to slip back in I had Kirsten to turn to. She kept me sane. I think both of us were going insane with the kids, but truth be told Im not sure I would have survived the week with out her. I would take the craziness of our kids that week a million times more rather then going through that week alone. We sat up at night and just talked and I cried and she let me. I could not even begin to count the number of times that she and I have been their for each other just to be a shoulder for the other one to cry on. Kirsten used to live in Alaska, so she knew Keyn and Noah’s whole family and having that person who knew them all first hand and cared about them too did so much to ease my heart and helped keep the darkness at bay. Noah came home the Saturday before Christmas and Kirsten left that Sunday. It was so hard to say goodbye to her. She is like a sister to me in every sense of the word except for blood relations.


It has been a month now since Keyns accident and he is still in a coma. He can move his head around and shakes his legs, Noahs oldest sister has named this act “crazy legs” because of how much they shake and move. He has opened his eye lids a little and will respond to questions people ask by squeezing their hands. He only does these things sometimes, and we think they are during moments when his mind is awake and not resting. We all talk to him and his sisters read to him. Noah tries to talk to him every night over facetime. They have put in a trache and a feeding tube and ended up shaving his head. I joke with him that he is not going to like it very much, because he has been in love with his hair for as long as I have known him. The last time I joked with him about this is moved his mouth like he was chewing something. This is the exact same thing Noah does when he sleeps, something I have teased him about for years because it literally sounds like he is eating a four course meal in his sleep. I almost wondered if he was trying to say something to me and when I told him he was doing the same thing Noah does in the middle of the night, he shook his head. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes because I felt so strongly that he heard me and was trying so hard to communicate. A friend of the family told us to start looking for signs of his communication. She said that since coma patients can’t talk they have to find other ways to communicate and that Keyn had those patterns for communication we just had to figure out what they were.
















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