Crazy Life

It's been such a whirlwind. I moved us out of our apartment the first week of June, and flew out to California to meet B when he finished up his outprocessing in Georgia. Two weeks in Cali and he was finallly back with us! We spent another two weeks between there and Nevada and then we were finally heading back to Hawaii.

We're currently staying at the Navy Lodge on Ford Island (part of Pearl Harbor Naval Base) waiting for our home to open up on Hickam AFB. We'll be moving into our house on THIS FRIDAY - YAY!!!!!

Meanwhile, we're getting back in the hang of family life. We took advantage last Sunday to go out and drive out to the northwestern part of the island. We found a neat area that didn't seem to get much traffic and showed Garin the tide pools - it was a good time.

Checking out the fish and crabs in the tidepool:

Cool tide pool:

We're also back in our crazy appointment cycle. Brianna met with the pediatric neurologist and the feeding time. The neurologist checked her kidney function (okay) and had them take blood to send off for genetic testing. It'll take a few weeks to get the results back from that. They sent some off for chromosonal testing, and others off for other genetic testing - there are hundreds of different possibilities there. If those show anything abnormal then B and I will get testing to compare the results. Yipee.

The feeding team was interesting. It includes the pediatric neurologist, a child psychologist, the nurse for the GI doctor, the speech pathologist and a nutritionist. Dr. Pederson (the neurologist) suggested that she may have GERD (reflux) and put in a prescription for that - we start her on that today. Hopefully this will help her gain weight. She doesn't spit up a lot, but has other flags for reflux, and it's possible that once the reflux kicks in, she stops eating and just snacks all day and never quite gets the calories she needs. Which is possibly why at 10 1/2 months she's only 13 pounds.

The speech pathologist also told me that her muscle tone weakness also seems to extend to the muscles in her mouth and esophogus, so we're going to continue to stick with the baby food. It takes her a while to eat it, since she doesn't really use her tongue and swallowing muscles ver well.

The nutritionist also instructed me to feed her solids more often (she can only handle baby food at this point) - about every 2-3 hours, since she can only eat about 2 ounces at a time. The child psychologist wanted me to "replace" two of the times I nurse with feeding her baby food. I had to bite my tongue, because that made no sense to me at all. Her reasoning was that for her psycho-social development she needs to focus on eating solids and less on breastfeeding. Which I could maybe get if she was over a year and we wanted to focus on her feeding herself, but to me, I don't quite get how spooning baby food into her mouth over nursing her will help her psycho-social development. But whatever.

I AM however adding some powdered formula to her jarred baby food (at the suggestion of the nutritionist) to bulk up the calories, which makes sense to me (breastmilk would thin it out and kill the consistency). Once I able to make my own babyfood again I'll use breastmilk when I can since it has more calories and better nutritional value than formula, but for now this method makes sense.

I'm giving her baby food about 4-5 times a day right now, she's totally not interested first thing in the morning, but it seems that as the day goes on, the more she likes to eat - and she DOES enjoy it, lurching towards the spoon with open mouth. But she can only do so much before she starts to cough and sputter, and then I "top her off" by nursing her. I nurse her whenever she wants, because she can certainly use it, and she needs it.

But she is doing so much better. My next post will be highlighting all about the things I have to be thankful for, because she IS improving and it's not all gloom and doom. =)

Garin had his speech evaluation two weeks ago. No surprises there. His ability to understand language and follow directions is right on target, but everyone else's ability to understand what HE'S saying, well, not so great. He has a difficult time translating what he hears into proper pronunciation, so he has some speech idiosyncracies (his hearing is fine, however). His vocabulary is great, and he speaks short phrases, he's just ridiculously difficult to understand. He mis-matches a lot of his consonants (he replaces many sounds with f-, g-, k- sounds). But he's getting speech therapy, and the speech pathologist was confident that with some work, he'll be right on track, so that's good!!

So that's it for now. I plan on posting in the next couple days with LOTS of pictures showing how great Brianna is doing!!

God bless!!