9 months old

Technically, Lucy turned nine months old on Monday, but since we just saw the doctor today, I will update her stats now!

She weighed 17 lbs, 4 oz which is much less than I expected her to weigh but the doctor didn't seem concerned at all so I'm not either. She is 27" long and her head circumference is 17 1/4" (I have NO idea how to gauge if head circumference is normal or not! haha).

The pediatrician was very impressed with how well Lucy was doing after her surgery. I also talked to her about my concern about Lucy's eating habits and she said just to take it slow and keep trying different things and that she would probably get the hang of it really soon. I hope so! They also tested her hemoglobin since she is exclusively breastfeeding at the moment and hasn't really consistently been eating solid food. Her hemoglobin was great, 13.8 or something like that, so the doctor was like, "No need to worry about feeding her iron-rich foods or giving her any iron supplements!" which is great because that is always the thing doctors seem to be concerned about with Lucy since she has been breastfed with some solid foods. It makes me feel good as a mom, too, because it means that I don't have to force Lucy to eat food because she's lacking in iron. We can go slow until she is ready.

She's been wearing her monitor today and doesn't seem to mind it. Only 10 more days to go! :)

Out with the caffeine, in with the monitor ...

So it's coming up on the end of December and that means it's been 90 days since Lucy had her last apnea episode. They told me that she could stop wearing her monitor after 90 days of no unusual activity. And as I may have mentioned on here, we stopped making her wear her monitor a few weeks ago ...

But it's also time for her to either start being weaned off the caffeine or get a new prescription refill, so I called yesterday and the apnea specialist and our pediatrician agreed to start weaning her off the caffeine! YES!!! So exciting. The less exciting part is that they need her to wear the monitor while we're weaning her off and then for 7-10 days after she's completely off the caffeine and then if the download is normal, we can take her off the monitor as well.

So it's great news and kind of stinky news. That means for at least two weeks she has to wear the monitor, and I hate that, just being honest. During the day it's impossible to keep up with her since the monitor cord only goes so far it means constantly moving the monitor around with her as she crawls and making sure she doesn't pull on the wires or try to pull off the band with the electrodes now that she's very able to do so. During the night it means having to wake up if it goes off for a false alarm because she moved too much in her sleep and the electrode stopped touching her body for just a second. This wakes her up (the alarm is super loud) and wakes me up of course. I'm bummed.

I thought maybe I would just let her wear it during the day since she's sleeping pretty great at night now (in five hour stretches) and that means I'm sleeping well, too! But during the day is also a pain in the butt. So you can see my problem... I keep reminding myself it's only for two weeks -- we can do it!

She had her 9 month pediatrician visit scheduled for Monday but I was not feeling well with kidney stones and she's very snotty and congested and coughing, so I rescheduled it for tomorrow. I'm interested to see how much she weighs. At the moment, I'm just breastfeeding her because she seems to be completely uninterested in solid food, both baby food and finger food. I've tried different flavors of baby food, warmed it up, left it cold (if it was a fruit), tried those Baby NumNum wafers, yogurt melts, soft veggies cut up, and over Christmas we tried giving her almost any of the food on our plates and she was just like, "No way!" So I'm trying not to stress too much about it. If she is gaining weight appropriately, I will worry less.

I'll update as soon as we have her pediatrician visit!

Appt. with Dr. Mackay

Yesterday we had Lucy's 3 1/2 week follow up appointment with Dr. Mackay. Again, it was one of those "drive an hour, wait, be seen for 2 minutes, and drive an hour home" type of things. I really am not exaggerating when I say we saw the doctor for about a minute. ;) He said she looked good and that she still had some swelling in her forehead and around her eyes. We have another appointment with him in three months. He also took some pictures of her head from the front and side. It was crazy to see the before pictures when she was only about 2 1/2 months old. She was so little!!!! Such a baby.

She's doing really well. She really is completely her normal self. She still wakes up about 3 times during the night, but I don't really care to do anything to change that. I just feed her and she goes right back to sleep.

I am still being a rebel -- when we went to Thomasville this past weekend, we just didn't put her monitor on her while she slept at night. Then since being back, I just haven't put it on her at all. It has almost been 90 days since her last apnea episode and they said that's when they usually take the monitor off. It's just impossible to keep a monitor on a very very active and mobile baby and during the night it was going off with a false alarm when she would wake up and move around. So I think we're done with the monitor. Now if we could just get her weaned off the caffeine, I think we'd have one "normal" baby on our hands. haha.

It was so nice to see so many people at New Covenant Church in Thomasville this past weekend -- and everyone said, "Oh, we read your blog and we love it!" It made me so encouraged to know that people were reading about Lucy and praying for her and keeping up with our family. I just want you ALL to know that words can't describe how much it means to us that you pray for us and that you support us. It is like a huge family.

I'll post again when Lucy turns 9 months old on December 27th! Until then, have a very Merry Christmas!

Soooooooooo thankful

I also wanted to post and say how incredibly, incredibly grateful I am for Wesley's job. I get to stay home with Lucy even though the budget can often be tight. And the best part of Wesley's job is the health insurance. I was reminded of how great it is to have insurance when the bills for Lucy's surgery came rolling in, and even though we don't have to pay for any of it (because we've already paid our max out of pocket deductible for her this year, due to the many hospitalizations she's already had) ... the cost of the surgery and the recovery days in the hospital is at least $80,000+ from the bills I've seen so far. That is a crazy amount.

A follow up visit to Dr. Wrubel

Sorry for the delay in posting. I can only blog when Lucy is napping or asleep at night and these days it seems like there is always something I need to do first (like eating, or using the restroom, or cleaning up the house) and then she's up from her nap or it's too late for me to blog.

The visit with Dr. Wrubel on Monday was very uneventful. They took a look at this little bump on the side of her temple and he said it was just a plate under the skin and that it would either dissolve or the growth in her face would make it not so noticeable. He wasn't worried about it. He also said we could wash her incision. I had only been washing around it, since Dr. Mackay said not to wash the actual incision. So I've started washing the incision and even before that, a lot of her stitches had fallen out on their own, especially the "knots" where it looks like they started and stopped the stitches.

She's doing great otherwise. She is into everything and I can't take my eyes off her for a moment's notice. I tried to feed her some table food today, instead of baby food, and it didn't go so well. I cooked a carrot and cut it up into tiny, tiny pieces and she put some of them in her mouth but then I guess she's not used to swallowing chunks of things and she gagged and promptly threw up the few pieces of carrot and the breastmilk she'd just eaten. Yeck. So I don't know what to do about that, other than to just keep trying. Eventually she'll get over that gag reflex, I guess.

Here's some pictures of her from the last week.

She likes to stand in her crib!

Before our visit to Dr. Wrubel Monday morning.

Mommy "helping" her stand up.

2 weeks post-op

December 1, 2010 -- 12 days post-op

December 2, 2010 -- 13 days post-op and VERY happy!

"Hi! My name is Lucy! Ooops, I mean ... Salut! Je m'appelle Lucy!" (We're trying to speak a lot of French to her)

December 3, 2010 -- 2 weeks post-op. Her eyes look a little more swollen than usual but I chalk that up to the fact that she did NOT want to sleep last night and did a lot of eye-rubbing, too.

Soooooo. Here we are at two weeks after Lucy's surgery. I vividly remember standing in the hospital room and speaking with Dr. Wrubel's nurse PA, Melissa, and trying to schedule a two week follow up visit with Dr. Wrubel and thinking that two weeks seemed to be so far away. And now it's here!

Our visit with Dr. Wrubel is actually Monday because that's when he has office hours. I'll update after we see him.

Lucy is doing great. She really seems to be very normal. One of her stitches even came out by itself today. I think that's a great sign of healing since we haven't messed with the incision at all at the request of Dr. Mackay. He said we could wash around it, but don't wash or touch the actual incision until he has a chance to see it at three weeks post-op.

I got a little concerned yesterday when she woke up because there was a very hard dime-sized bump on her right temple area in front of the incision. It wasn't red or irritated and it didn't seem to bother Lucy, but it worried me a little since it was so hard and I didn't know what it could be (and since I only felt it on the one side). So I called Dr. Wrubel's office and Melissa called me back and said that she would talk to Dr. Wrubel about it in the morning and she didn't think it was probably anything to worry about. When Wesley came home from work he reminded me that Dr. Mackay had said that he put a plate in that area so maybe now that a lot of the swelling has decreased that plate is more obvious. Melissa called me back this morning to say that Dr. Wrubel didn't think it was anything to be very concerned about and that he would take a look at it Monday when we were in the office. So I hope it's nothing.