Progress, blessing and hope

Yesterday Elijah got his breathing tube out! We were so excited yet a bit skeptical that they might change their minds. They didn't and when I arrived at the hospital there was Elijah with his hands in his mouth just loving it. Today he is sucking on a pacifying very vigorously. He is a little grumpy probably due to a sore scratchy throat that is a result of having the breathing tube in for so long. His cry is so precious! I have not heard it for over a month.
Today Elijah is going down to interventional radiology to get a deep vein line that hopefully will last awhile. He needs it only because he has three more weeks of his 42 day course of antibiotics. I am trying not to look to far to the future but please excuse me I'm just going to dream for a minute. He can go home on IV antibiotics. OK, I'm done. That's all the dreaming I am going to do for now. {:o)
As much as we want to just relax and say he is getting better we need to keep in the back of our minds that he still pretty fragile and still has hurdles to get over.
God has answered so many of our prayers. We just can't forget that. Sometimes I forget when they are not answered imediately or in the way I expect. God is not a fast food God, His motto is not "have it your way". His ways are perfect. I can see this in our experience, I don't understand it but I see blessing and I see growth. I was reading in Romans 8 " For in this hope we were saved. But hope [the object of ] which is seen is not hope. For how can one hope for what he already sees? But if we hope for what is still unseen by us, we wait for it with patience and composure. " Read the rest because it talks about the Spirit inercededing for us because we do not know what to pray. That is so true. I pray for specific things and I pray for what I want but I don't know the big picture. What is best? So we don't need to stress about what to pray, we just hope even when we don't know what's going to happen and don't understand. That is freedom! I am free to hope for the unseen, the unlikely and the unimaginable.
All I know right now is that Elijah is such a blessing to all he comes in contact with. Yesterday the anesthiologist was just about in tears telling me what a beautiful boy he is and what a beautiful spirit he has. That is after only a few minutes of examining him. In some way Elijah touched him and it opened him up to talk about the beauty of these precious souls that the world says are not perfect. This doctor said, maybe it is all us that are not normal.
I could relay so many experiences here that were just a bit of God's picture of why we are where we are. If I only keep my eyes open they are there.
What a blessing!
Lori