Hmm... Where to start?

Okay, so I've been thinking of doing this for a while now, but haven't really known where to start. So I guess I'll start by introducing you to our family:

This is my husband, Luke, and me- we celebrated our 7th anniversary this year. We lived in San Diego for a few years while Luke finished his enlistment in the Marine Corps and I finished college. We moved back to Denver, where we both grew up, in 2005. Luke is a software engineer for EMC. I worked for Boulder County until August.

Until this spring, these were our kids. Duncan and Maggie are our (very) spoiled dogs. Maggie is the older, more... intelligent?... one. She invents her own games to play, and somehow manages to get her brother into trouble fairly regularly. Maggie knows real tricks, as opposed to...

...Duncan. He's our giant baby. He's the lovey one of the two, and is always good for a laugh. The only tricks he knows, though, is to smile when he's really in trouble. And how can you get mad at that? He's afraid of everything, including the camera (we were only able to get this one because he had no idea what the fancy camera equipment was-- once the flash went off, he hid in the bathtub for the rest of the day...), so you probably won't see much of him.

The dogs were forced to take the back seat this spring when we welcomed our daughter, Piper, into our lives. What a blessing she has been! She was born on May 11, eight weeks early. She weighed 3 pounds, 6 ounces and was 15 1/2 inches long. We were so excited to meet her, we just didn't think it had to be quite that soon.

When I was 17 weeks along with Piper, we found out that she had Down Syndrome. While it was a shock, and took some adjusting to, our love for her was never stronger. We had many appointments after that to make sure that everything was going well. At about 26 weeks, Piper was diagnosed with Duodenal Atresia. This is one of the most common issues that kids with Down Syndrome have. It's when the lower part of the stomach doesn't connect to the upper part of the intestine. She had surgery on her second day of life to correct it. Thanks to amazing surgeons, it was done laproscopically (which isn't done many places) even though she was so tiny.

Piper came home from the hospital on her 7 week birthday. It was the best day ever! She weighed 5 pounds, 3 ounces that day. We waited for several weeks for her to learn to eat; once she learned she did GREAT. A few days after she took her first bottle, we were home.

This is Piper now. She's five months old, and doing really well! She's working on the skills to crawl and weight bear in therapy, which is really exciting. It's so fun to see her learning and figuring out the world around her! She's started to laugh and talk a lot-- it makes my heart sing to hear her! She's still pretty teeny-weeny (about 7 and a half pounds last week), so we're working on the whole growing thing.

So that's our family (minus the chinchillas in the basement, but they're camera shy). Join us in our journey, wonchya?