A Year in Review 2008

This is another first for me. Trying to summarize our year in a one page letter, so here goes...


2008 started off with a bang at the Grelle house. On 1/4, Christy was put on bed rest due to pregnancy induced hypertension, in the morning on 1/7, she was admitted to the hospital for observation , and at 9:31pm that night, Samantha Grace arrived by emergency C-section 5 weeks and 1 day early. She was 18 inches long and weighed 5 lbs 13 oz. She was huge for being so early! Samantha immediately went to the NICU on a C-PAP machine and Christy stayed in surgery for 2 more hours due to complications. Samantha was off the CPAP by Tuesday morning and then only remained in the NICU for feeding issues.







Christy went home on 1/12, and Samantha remained in the hospital until 1/15, so that she could get strong enough to eat without having to be tube fed every other feeding. Although we desperately wanted her home immediately, we did come to realize that a bit of extra recuperation time for Christy was a huge blessing, before we had to meet the full-time demands of a newborn baby.



Our sweet little girl is adventurous, entertaining, happy, intelligent, determined (that sounds better than stubborn!) and giggly. She is our monkey, our sweet pea and our beautiful angel. We are so grateful for the gift of her in our lives.

Samantha has had some struggles this year, mostly with reflux and a lack of good weight gain. Dr. Ramirez (pediatrician), Dr. Argao (pediatric GI) and Dr Peskind (ENT) have all been wonderful in handling the challenges that have come up. This fall she has had multiple ear infections, so she had surgery to have tubes in her ears on 12/19. We are hopeful that this will stop the ear infections and we have already seen some increase in her appetite. The weight gain should be coming, we will see how she is doing at her one year appointment.

Brent has continued mountain biking this year, although he doesn’t go as frequently as he did before we had a baby. He has met some milestones this year, with not only riding in his first race, but actually taking 1st place overall for the series of 4 races. He placed in the top three for each of the races, so now we have a new collection of drinking glasses to find a spot for. He also rode in his first endurance ride recently. It was a 6 hour ride and he made it for 5 of those 6 hours, with 3 hours and 45 minutes actually in the saddle. He is still working at LSI Greenlee, and seems to be expected to take over for his boss when James retires. We’ll see what happens.

Christy is still working at Denton County as a juvenile probation officer. She enjoys this job, but looks forward to the time when she can stay home with Samantha. Although it is hard to leave Samantha with the babysitter every morning, having the babysitter was a blessing when Christy was sick and could take Samantha to the babysitter then go home and go back to sleep for the rest of the day. Between working during the day and being a mommy at night and on weekends, there hasn’t been much time for scrapbooking, but she did get to start on Samantha’s baby book in September.

We have been truly blessed throughout this year and hope that all of our friends and family have as well.

Since I started my blog in the middle of the year, I have chosen a few pictures to share with you from each month of the year. The above pictures were all from January.

February 2008


March 2008


April 2008



May 2008


June 2008


July 2008



August 2008

September 2008

October 2008

November 2008

December 2008



Happy New Year! Love, Brent, Christy and Samantha Grelle