One year adjusted age

Hope is 16 months, or 12 adjusted. Look at her go! She is doing amazingly well. Not only did she start walking today, but she has been getting great news at her dr. appts. Back in October, she saw or heard from most of her different docs. She does not need glasses at this point and does not even need to see the opthalmologist again for 9 months. Her GI doc wanted to know if I wanted to test her gut. I did, so she's moved up to a less broken down formula. She is doing great on it (gaining well, too) so we will be trying whole milk within the week. Woo hoo! We don't see the GI doc again for another 6 months.

Her pulmonologist wasn't quite as enthusiastic. Hope's sleep study showed that, although she is satting much better at night(95% on her tummy), she is still having a significant number of apneas. She sent us to an Ear,Nose, and Throat doc who really didn't find much. He thought that it was probably some reflux and put her back on an acid reducer. Easy enough fix. She will need to repeat the sleep study some time next year. In the meantime, we need to monitor her every time she gets sick. At the moment she has a cold, so we've been back on the monitor at nights. Thankfully she has been doing fine, but we're going to have to be more careful again. I'm thinking we will be kind of house-bound again this winter. It's not going to be as critical this year, but we still need to avoid illness as much as possible. We don't want to wind up back on oxygen.

Hope will be going back up to Sacred Heart in December to have a dye study and ultrasound to see how her kidneys are doing. Hopefully, they will no longer be refluxing and she will be able to get off her daily dose of antibiotics. If it doesn't resolve on its own she will need surgery, but I don't know how soon. We'll have to keep you posted on that one.

We may still find ourselves in the dr. office more than the average family, but Hope is acting like a regular kiddo nowadays. As I'm writing, she is sitting here screaming at Andy and trying to push buttons on the computer. It is a lot of fun to watch her and Andy playing together. She definitely has opinions!

More birthday girl pics

We made it!

Here's some pics of our big birthday girl. She really enjoyed her cake.

Still more

More Shots From Uncle Steve

Uncle Steve was up visiting and got some great shots of the kids. I think my nephew, Noah, took the one of Nate. The kids had great fun playing with their cousins.

Hope is doing really well. She is still a little ways off from crawling, but she's certainly mobile. We keep finding her wedged under the couch. As for the other photos - Grandma is up visiting and she took us out for a picnic lunch at this little church she found out in the country. It was pretty neat and we had a lovely time.