A few pictures of life before the madness

My little sister, Dana, and I the morning Madelyn was born. She's also Maddy's Fairy God Momma! :)

Baby Madelyn hours after she was born. Already a mommy's girl! What a little snuggler!!

My three precious babies the day Madelyn was born. Hayden and Alana were so happy to meet Maddy!

My beautiful Madelyn four weeks old.

Snoozing away in my favorite spot-Mommy and Daddy's bed! :)

Shopping at Target with the family!

Did I mention she's a snuggler?!?

The many personalities of Madelyn!!! :) Love her!

She makes me smile! :)

Meet Baby Madelyn

This is our "fighter"...Madelyn Jo. She's a happy, sweet baby girl who loves to snuggle!







    Hello, Everyone! My name is Megan...aka Madelyn's mommy. I decided to start a blog about our special girl for several reasons. I have had a lot of very loving friends and family ask about her. Instead of updating everyone individually, I felt this would be more efficient and affective. I'm also going to approach this as somewhat of a therapy outlet for myself. I have a lot of things that rattle around in my brain...even more after Maddy was diagnosed, and I feel like getting them down in words would be good! I also really want awareness for her condition...I'll get to that later! :) Now, I think it's time for you to, like it says, meet Madelyn and hear her story!

   Madelyn Jo McCarthy was born on August 28, 2012. Her daddy (Joe) and I were very excited for her to finally get here! After a very eventful pregnancy (mommy had influenza and gestational diabetes) she was born by induction. The labor was a little long, but nothing we couldn't handle! Right away Maddy had two very special visitors...her older brother Hayden and sister Alana. They were and still are very much their sister's protector! Totally in love!! Maddy appeared to everyone to be happy, healthy, and thriving!
   We brought her home and settled in nicely as a family of five. Everyone seemed to find thier place among the madness and things just "worked" for us. Looking back I guess there were a few red flags but nothing too alarming, so we just went about our daily life.
   Maddy had a routine three month baby appointment at our physican's office around the end of November. The doctor told us she checked out with a clean bill of health...I wasn't however completely convinced. After a day or two of thinking about it, I had Joe call every local pediatrian he could find and see if one of them had an opening.
   On November 30th we walked into Dr. Nelson's office in Topeka. I was pretty much convinced that we would be walking out in an hour or so with some acid reflux medicine and be on our way...Not even close.
  I started to tell the doctor about what I was seeing and why I was concerned about Madelyn. She had little to no head control, her body was so stiff you could teeder tooder off it, she completely refused a bottle (even though she nursed like a champ), and probably most alarming was that she was three months old and only wieghed a little over 8 pounds.
   What happened next will forever be engraved in my mind. The doctor looked at Joe and I and very calmly said, "Has anyone ever talked to you about cerebal palsy?"

   Our world was never quite the same.