The bravest boy in the whole wide world

Here are some photos of the beginning of Austin's new diabetic life, in no particular order. We are so proud of our incredible little boy and feel very blessed to have him in our lives.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but basically the first 24 hours he was in the hospital, Austin had a finger poked at least once per hour. His tiny fingers looked horrible by Wednesday morning. Poor little guy.

It was so hard for us to see him like this. He looked so tiny on the hospital bed. We are so thankful to have him home and living life as normal as possible.

Here's Austin's bed at home, with Hospital Buddy and Rufus in their new home. We happily adopted them and brought them home from the hospital. Rufus is a bear with diabetes just like Austin, he was given to him by the JDRF. Rufus wears a diabetic bracelet just like Austin. And sometimes Rufus and Austin talk about what it's like to have diabetes.

How would Austin get through all this without the love of sweet sisters? Here's a card Megan mailed him to help him feel better (on the back she drew a picture of a needle).

This is our lives now, counting every single carb that goes into that kids mouth. Here's our new snack box with everything carefully portioned and labeled. We keep getting told that one day we'll be experts at this.

When Austin could finally leave on Friday afternoon he got to go for a wheelchair ride, which he thought was pretty cool!

Here is Austin with HIS Nichole, she was his favorite nurse and she took awesome care of him. She has a very special place in all of our hearts.

Here is Hospital Buddy, he was given to Austin to take care of. Austin checked his blood pressure, looked in his ears, listened to his heart, gave him shots and loved him better.

As you might imagine, it was quite the job to convince a 3 year old to let us poke his finger and give him injections over and over again so we made him these sticker charts, once he fills a sticker chart he gets to go to a dollar store and pick any toy he wants.

Here's Austin snuggled up with his daddy and Buddy watching a movie (we watched a lot of movies!) his cousin Josh brought up Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs the first day and we probably watched that eight times while in the hospital.

We all thought it was pretty cool that Spiderman was hanging out at his hospital. Each morning we had to go check and see if Spiderman was still there.

Here's Austin playing in the Play Room with Janiel. Every time Rob and I had one of our longer classes a volunteer would play with Austin in the Play Room until we were done. The volunteers were all so awesome and he loved all the different things they had for him to do there.

Here's Austin when they FINALLY let him have a meal. He ate ham and pancakes and he ate every tiny bite and then licked all the syrup off the plate.

Austin loved it when volunteers would stop by and see if he needed any toys. They had every thing he asked for and it was great, especially when he was still "plugged in" and couldn't get around much. He was so happy when they took him off the IV and he was "unplugged"

Here's Austin and Kaylee at 6am the morning before he went into the hospital, he was feeling so yucky that he couldn't sleep anymore (a giveaway that something is wrong, the kid would sleep until 9am if we let him)