Friday, July 30, 2010

Found some old photos

Apparently I hadn't downloaded photos from my nice camera since early June! Here are a couple that I thought were cute from June.

Daddy was trying to get her to pull to stand. My how things change in a month! Now she wouldn't need any coaxing at all!


And more of her having fun with those foam letter mats.


Sunday, July 25, 2010

She is moving!

Sweet Pea has finally decided that it is worth the energy to find mommy instead of just sitting in the other room and fussing!  Yippee!!!!  I know we will regret being so excited about this some day, but for today, it is a very good thing!  Saturday morning she followed my voice (with me peeking around the corner at her to give her extra motivation) from the living room into the far end of the kitchen.  She then repeated it a couple of hours later and I attempted to capture it on video.  I apologize up front for the extremely unsteady camera work.  I was trying to crawl backwards myself.



Her other big news that I don't have any pictures of is that she is pulling to stand a lot now and even did it in the tub today all by herself.  She is still very stiff legged when she is standing and leans on anything and everything that she can, but she is wanting to put weight on her legs!  Another yippee!  She often pulls up using my arms as her brace, but she is starting to try standing on more and more things.  She won't do ANY of this for her PT, but as long as she does it for us I am alright.  I think the PT is starting to take it personally though.

Our local Down syndrome group had a play date at the beach today.  It was a lot of fun and Sweet Pea enjoyed playing in the sand.  I only took a couple pictures, but here they are along with a few other photos that we have taken recently.

Sweet Pea with Woody at a local market:


My Aunt was in town and this is the only photo I took the entire time of the two of them!!! I don't know how that happened, but I know that Sweet Pea loves her and vice versa:


Hmmm...sand


One of her many boyfriends:




Do you like my huge hat?

Thursday, July 15, 2010

We're still alive...I think

So you thought we fell off the face of the earth?  Close, but not quite. We are all healthy again and Sweet Pea is almost done with the rash, but it's still lingering as things often do with her. Her appetite is back and for that we are thankful. The switch to Good Start Soy Plus formula seems to be going smoothly and I haven't noticed the horrible gas in the past few days. At least it isn't as bad as it was right before the switch! I don't ever want my sweet little girl to be stinking up a room so badly again!

Yesterday morning we were getting ready for work and to take Sweet Pea to daycare when Daddy started cracking up. I had to come see what was so funny and this is what I saw:







Somehow she got the foam B cutout over her head and was having a grand old time. She is a silly little girl and just loves those foam floor pieces!

Here are some photos from the 4th of July. We went down to our local park that has a live band and then does a great fireworks display. Her bedtime is 7pm and so we put her down at my sister's house until we were ready to walk down a little before 8pm. She slept all the way down to the park in the stroller and when we arrived at the park the noise woke her up. For never being up past her bedtime, she wasn't sure what was going on. We took her over to where the band was playing and the cousins were having a blast dancing and Sweet Pea was enjoying herself.



Then it was time to go hang out on our blankets and get ready for the fireworks show to start.





The fireworks are launched about 200-300 ft away from our blanket so they are going off right over us and it is a great show. It's loud and we weren't sure how Sweet Pea would handle it, but she did wonderful! Was interested in the lights for just a short bit and then was happy just playing with the blanket and tarp that we were sitting on for the remainder of the show. She fell asleep as soon as we started walking back. It was a great night!

Monday, July 12, 2010

We've been a house of sickies

In my last post I was asking for positive sleeping thoughts...well...they didn't work! Turns out that Sweet Pea had a terrible night, but Mommy actually had an even worse night. Mommy caught whatever Sweet Pea had and so I was just taking care of myself and so Daddy had to deal with Sweet Pea for another night so that was 2 nights of no sleep for him. I finally felt better about 6pm last night and wouldn't you guess it...Daddy got sick! So last night was his night of having a terrible night and so I finally got to take care of Sweet Pea. She is doing better, but not 100% yet. And now she has a rash that is from her MMR shot! At least we know what that is and so we don't have to worry about it, but gosh! Daddy is still feeling bad today so hopefully when the 24 hour mark hits for him he will also feel a lot better like it did for me. Please think good thoughts for Daddy and maybe this house will eventually be healthy again!

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Why is she sick again?!?!?!

I can not believe that Sweet Pea is sick again! It is almost never ending with her! Now she has just a regular "summer bug" as the pediatrician called it, but it's a doozy. Her throat is red and agitated so she isn't eating or drinking much, vomiting at times, loads of fun diarrhea that doesn't even stay in the diapers, won't sleep well, wants to be held almost nonstop and can't be at daycare or around other kiddos as she is still contagious. I had great plans of taking her today to our great community little kid pool that is heated so she actually enjoys it! Maybe trying to get a playdate together? Ha! Not going to happen now!

And I had hopes of her reaching 20 lbs in the next couple of weeks. She weighed in at 19lbs 12oz fully clothed on Friday and I'm sure that she is losing by the hour since she isn't eating or drinking.

The doctor also gave us Good Start Soy Plus (baby formula) to try instead of the Silk. The reason for the switch...how do I say this politely...my little girl has gas that will clear an auditorium of college frat boys. I mean, it's awful! It's hard to imagine that such a smell can come out of something so cute and small! But there is no mistaking it, she is doing it! The doctor thinks that it could be that her body isn't quite ready to handle the soy protein and I guess this formula has it already slightly broken down. The hope is that a few months of this and then she will be ready for the Silk again. We were enjoying the ease of not having to measure out formula and then add the Simply Thick, but I can't let my little princess keep tooting such foul toots!

And finally, I'll be lucky if I get more than 3 hours of straight sleep at this rate. I'm a very lucky wife because my hubby gets up with her most of the time at night, but I still hear him get up (funny that I often don't hear her crying but I hear him getting out of bed or opening the door to the bedroom to leave). I think tonight will be my night with Sweet Pea though so think positive sleeping thoughts for Sweet Pea and Mommy! :-)

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

New Tooth!

I have to admit, I have no idea when this third tooth first started breaking through as I only saw it tonight. She has been drooling up a storm the past week and now we know why! She was playing one of her current favorite games...Mommy lies on the floor and Sweet Pea sits next to her, then turns towards Mommy and dives in an attempt to get over Mommy somehow. She often will get up on her knees and even onto her feet in the process of trying to fling over the top of Mommy. It's an entertaining game for all involved! Tonight we were playing a few rounds and as she is laughing her bum off with her mouth wide open I look up and see white where I don't think it normally is. I stick my finger in her mouth and there is something sharp. I'm guessing it's a 2 year molar because it is in the top back left of her mouth...not really far back though so I don't know. It's got two pieces of tooth sticking out on the outer gum line and one tiny one on the inner gum line. Since it's common for children with DS to have odd shaped and placed teeth, I'm really hoping that this is a typical looking molar and that the 4th corner hasn't broken through yet. Time will tell, but I'm keeping these fingers crossed (which is making typing this difficult)!

Sorry for there not being any pictures this post...I haven't even taken any in probably a week! Bad Mommy!

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Belated 15 Month Birthday

Sweet Pea celebrated her 15 month birthday on Tuesday.  We visited with her pediatrician and overall she is doing very well.  Here are the highlights:
  • The hand, foot, mouth disease is gone!
  • She weighs 19 lbs 5oz (puts her 50-75 percentile on DS growth charts)
  • 28 1/2 inches long (puts her 50-75 percentile on DS growth charts)
  • Doctor recommended we try to move away from Alimentum formula to regular soy milk and we are thrilled about that shift!  Sweet Pea is liking the soy milk (original flavor is all we have tried so far) and one and a half days into it she doesn't appear to be having any reactions yet so keep your fingers crossed.  This will save us a lot of money each week and make fixing her drinks a lot easier.  Now we just have to start transitioning to her drinking it cold...
  • We are going to switch reflux medications to Nexium in hopes that it does more for her than the Prevacid is doing.  We won't switch for another week or two because we need to make sure that she doesn't have a reaction to one of the vaccines she was given that we might mistake for an issue with the new medication.
Cognitively Sweet Pea is really doing well!   She is putting the plastic cookies through the slot in the milk jug and the shapes through the holes in the shape sorter container.  We help by covering up the wrong holes, but it's still great!  Sweet Pea has figured out a lot more of the things on her huge rain forest toy...putting balls into the elephant, pulling up to kneeling and playing with the ball and other toys on top of it, she even put a ball on the slide this afternoon!  This toy may be huge, but it really is great for her!



Her babbles are becoming more entertaining in that she is doing some of them with a ton of inflection.  We have fun mimicking her and she laughs so adorably when we do.

She has learned two new signs this month...please and thank you.  Yes, we have a polite little girl.  Ha!  We can't teach her milk or eat which would really be useful, but we can teach her to be polite.  Go figure!  Her thank you is the most adorable thing ever because she has combined blowing kisses with thank you so you get a kiss sound with the hand motion.  I'll try to get it on video sometime because that would be something to keep for her memory books.  Her "all done" sign is maturing as well.  It used to be just one hand and we would show her that it was supposed to be with both hands at the same time.  Now she does one hand, then switches to the other and then often finishes with the original hand again.  She knows that she is supposed to do both, just doesn't have them at the same time yet.  Baby steps!

Sweet Pea does her own kind of dancing now too.  It's all just waving the arms around frantically, but it is too cute.  She doesn't maintain it for more than a few seconds, but boy the smile she puts on when she does it!  This little girl loves her music and loves the toys that she is able to make play music by herself!

Food: Everything is still pureed, but we have brought back in squash which she used to hate.  She is eating more quantity and we just have to remember to get another container out when she finishes a jar because often she is still wanting more.

Now for a TON of photos and videos...

First are a bunch from our playdate on Sunday with the local DS support group.  It was at a great facility called NAPA Center and they had a lot of fun things for all the kids to do.  The zip line was a blast, Sweet Pea finally found a slide that she loved, we realized that a drum set may be in our future, gabbing with good friends is always a favorite of hers, a big ball pit to sink into was a fun new experience and we may need to be afraid of her taking our car keys in the future...





























And here is one of her showing off another new trick on her rain forest toy...and making sure Mommy is watching her do it.  I love that she yells at the toy at the end when it isn't doing what she wanted it to!  It shows her true colors...



And one final picture for an extra special Crazy Aunt that we can't wait to move out here in a few months...her hair really is growing!