It has been a while since I have updated the blog! Life with five kids is super busy, as you can imagine. I wanted to give everyone a quick update on our family and The Allo Hope Foundation.

Our baby August is now ten months old and is thriving! He is meeting all of his milestones on time- crawling everywhere, eating everything, pulling up and climbing furniture and babbling. He is such a sweet, happy baby. August is completely done with HDFN and has no lasting effects from his battle with anti-Kell antibodies. I will write a blog post soon with more details about his treatment for HDFN after he was discharged from the hospital. Here are some recent pictures of our baby August!

Callum is now three years old and will start preschool in the fall. He loves letters and numbers, cars, trains, and his siblings. He is a sweet big brother to August. Nora is now five, about to turn six, and will be starting kindergarten in the fall. She is still very maternal, taking care of all four of her brothers, even when they don’t need her help. Liam and Asher are now twelve and ten years old and are super independent and fun to be with. We feel so incredibly blessed to have five living, healthy children. We never thought we would actually be able to complete our family, but we are definitely finished having babies. Josh had a vasectomy last month so we will never have to face another high risk pregnancy. VERY glad to be done!

The Allo Hope Foundation is the nonprofit organization that I started in 2019 to help educate and support families who are facing maternal alloimmunization and HDFN. We have a ton of resources available on our website www.allohopefoundation.org and we have a support group on Facebook called Support for Antibodies in Pregnancy. If you have been diagnosed with red cell antibodies during pregnancy, come and join our group on Facebook where you can meet other women who have experienced an alloimmunized pregnancy. We also recently created educational booklets for patients with antibodies. We have a prenatal booklet for pregnant women with antibodies and a post birth booklet for parents of babies with HDFN.

If you would like a booklet, just fill out this form and I am happy to send you one free of charge! Another project we are super excited about is the Alloimmunization/HDFN research platform at AllStripes. Patients can sign up for free at www.allstripes.com

As always, I’m happy to answer any questions about HDFN and antibodies in pregnancy. Just leave me a comment here or you can email me at bethany@allohopefoundation.org