About Our Family and This Blog

Hello! This blog is mainly intended to communicate updates about Lillian's heart and health to the wide range of people who are following her and praying for her but aren't getting updates through Facebook. If you know me, you'll know that posts will take two forms - long winded exposition on the first months of Lillian's life to help me catch up to her current state and short updates about her status once I have the blog up to date. I'm not going to recount every little piece of drama about the time before I started this blog, although it will still probably be an excruciating amount of detail. This blog is also intended for Lillian to read at some point though, hence the level of detail and personal letters to her and occasionally Annabelle. It is however, a blog about Lillian's heart, so most of the content will be devoted to that subject.

A note for those reading who are not Lillian: you are more than welcome, and indeed encouraged to comment and ask questions on the blog. I know that I have not done the best job explaining things, especially since most of the recap posts were written late at night while Lillian was in the hospital. I'm more than happy to add details and explanations, you just need to let me know where they're needed. Quite frankly, I enjoy this, so ask away.

To the members of Lillian's medical team who may have taken the time to read this, thank you for staying up to date on Lillian. It means so much when any of you stop by to check on Lillian even when she's not your patient, and both Kathryn and I love to see you involved in her care. I've done my best job of recapping and summarizing as best as possible, but I'm sure I'm wrong in parts. PLEASE let me know if I have made a mistake, even a simple spelling error. I would like this to be as accurate as possible. And if you take an issue with something else, please let me know and we will deal with it. But again, thank you for reading about her.

Now, a little about us before we start the journey with Lillian. Kathryn and I met in high school at Cedar Park, a local private high school. Initially an inconsequential encounter, her "borrowing" of my sister's cell phone to text me turned into a friendship cemented on the basis of thousands of text messages a month. As I left Cedar Park to pursue Running Start, our friendship became deeper until we were best friends. Even though we did not attend school together, I would still say that our friendship turned into a high school romance on November 4th, 2004, but one much stronger than most. In addition to having a firm basis as friends to start, Kathryn and I got our first jobs together, opened our first bank accounts together and generally displayed a level of dedication that I feel would be extremely uncommon for a normal high school relationship. Throughout the years we were dating, through trips to art museums on Capitol Hill, shopping in Fremont and cruises in the Caribbean; it became clear that our commitment to each other was deep and (and this is the only time you'll ever hear me get mushy) filled with love. We were wed on June 30th, 2007 in a private ceremony with family.

Kathryn and I knew from the beginning of our relationship that we both wanted children in the future. So it should come as no surprise that we welcomed our first daughter, Annabelle Rose Boer, to the world on June 6th, 2008. Now two and a half years old, Annabelle is a precocious, smartalec toddler, always happy and full of life, yet always ready to throw Kathryn and I for a loop. She is a blessing in every sense of the word, always making us smile and break out into laughter. Annabelle is always ready to sit on the couch next to me and try to play video games with me, always wanting to draw with whatever she can get on whatever surface she can find, and always trying to sneak a snack out of the fridge. A little girl with a never ending source of energy, she has been a thrilling addition to our family.

I like bees!

Chunky as a baby

Just as mischievous today