Friday, May 6, 2011

Molly Info - 16 1/2 months

This is more for my benefit later one when I look back and wonder what Molly was doing at 16 1/2 months!

Yesterday, during Molly’s ENT appointment, they asked me how we felt her hearing and speech development was. I said “everything seems to be going well!” He said “does she say about 6-10 words?” I said “Oh yeah!” Ted looked at me shocked. He didn’t think so but I started to rattle off everything she is saying now and I started to realize that she is saying a lot:

Mommy
Daddy
Bobo (for Brody)
E-tan (for Ethan)
Book
Apple
Eat-eat
Night-night
Pop-Pop
Mamee (instead of MeeMaw)
Go
Shoe
Juice
Papi (for paci)
Baby
Elmo
Fishy

In addition to her expansive vocabulary :) she now has 7 teeth! Four on the top (including the two middle ones with a big gap in between) and three on the bottom. Unfortunately, her teeth look a little jacked up right now, but it just adds to her beauty! :)

A little more about her right now. She was fully clothed yesterday (including shoes and jeans) and she was 26 lbs. and 30 inches tall. She is growing up too fast!! She climbs on everything, including stairs, and her Grandma taught her to go down the stairs on her behind rather than try and walk down. She still loves her bath and gets really excited about brushing her teeth. Of course, she is still an amazing sleeper (even now when she is sick!) I am so thankful for her every day!

Cooties!

Okay…it has been almost a month since my last post and there is lots going on.

First, the good news. Ted and I are going on vacation! We are heading to Cancun for about a week at the end of this month for our anniversary and I can not wait! We will be celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary on May 28th! It seems like we have been married longer than that! My parents are going to watch the kids that week for us. Ted and I have both said we are not planning anything except relaxing, beaching and pooling it, drinking, and sleeping! Ahhh………sounds so nice. I know I will miss the kiddies though, but they will be in good hands. In 18 days, we will be here!!


Now on to the bad news. We are all sick! That is everyone except Ted. Not sure how he escaped that one. Last week, Brody was coughing, mostly at night, and I thought it was just his allergies acting up. He is like his Daddy in that respect. When the pollen gets bad around here, which it has been the last month, their allergies are real bad. On Saturday morning, he was laying with me and I could hear him wheezing so I decided to take him to the doctor. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get in with my doctor’s office so they told me considering his symptoms to take him the urgent care. We got there, they did a chest x-ray, said that looked good and gave him an overall check up. They said they couldn’t see anything that would be causing it so they said he might have just picked up a virus and it would have to run its course. Then Sunday morning, I got a call from them and they said the radiologist ended up looking at his chest x-ray and said he had the beginnings of pneumonia. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that the doctor at the urgent care missed it. I thought something else might have been wrong and should have trusted my “Mommy instinct” They told me they were going to call in an antibiotic and that he needed to start using his inhaler again. So we did that and he seemed to be better on Monday morning.

I got the kids ready on Monday morning for school, dropped them off and headed to work. Got to work around 8:00 and sure enough, at 9:02, I got a call from the kids’ school. It was Molly’s teacher asking me to give her a call. I wasn’t sure what was up…figured she had just gotten hurt or fell or something. Nope! When I called, they said Molly was running a 101 fever and she was fussy ever since I left. I thought that was strange because she was absolutely fine that morning! She didn’t give me any inclination that she wasn’t feeling good. My mom went and picked her up and kept her for the day. When I headed home from work, I left a little late and told Ted to keep her up because I wanted to see her. My mom said she was fine in the morning, but in the afternoon, she was running a fever again and was real clingy. When I got home, I almost cried. She looked horrible. When my little girl doesn’t feel good, it is written all over her face. She gets dark circles under her eyes and she just looks beat down. I swooped her up and she was burning up. I took her temp and sure enough…it was 102. She was breathing real funky and I was worried about her getting pneumonia since the last time, she got it right after Brody. So I decided to take her to the doc. Since I was still pissed with our urgent care, I took her to the ER at Children’s Hospital for them to check her out. When we got there, she was running a 104 fever and they immediately gave her a Tylenol suppository. Poor thing! When we got back to the room, all she did was lay on me, sweating up a storm. The doc checked her out and said her lungs sounded fine and that she was probably just fighting a virus. Luckily we were in and out of there by 8:00. On the way home, I was joking with my Mom, who was so gracious to come with me, that Molly has never been in the car and not home in her bed after 7:00-7:30 in her life! Crazy! Anyway, she ended up staying home all week and today was her first day back at school. Considering it is now 3:00 and I haven’t gotten a call, I consider it a success.

Yesterday, she had her ENT appointment scheduled because her pediatrician said she needed to be seen since she was having recurring ear infections and persistent fluid in her ear. When we were at the ER the other night, the doctor did say something to me about her right ER and when I mentioned that we had the ENT appointment this week, he decided not to do anything about it. The first part of her appointment was a hearing test. The first thing they do is a tympanogram, which I wrote about in a previous blog. This test assesses the movement of her ear drum. She failed both ears at her pediatrician’s office, but luckily, this time she only failed on the right side. The next thing they did was the actual hearing test. They had her sit on my lap and made noises in speakers to her left and right. She did really good with that, but they said that they think she is hearing more out of her left than her right. She might have minor hearing loss in her right ear, which is caused from the fluid sitting behind her ear drum. Once we got called back to see the doctor, a resident came in first to assess her situation. He took a peek at her ears and then decided he needed to clean them out. My poor baby was screaming her little heart out the entire time. I felt so bad for her. I finally had to have Ted hold her because I couldn’t do it anymore. Not only was I emotional, but she was making me sweat! The doc came in and said that considering we are going into the summer months, which means it is not ear infection “season” he wanted to give her a little bit of time to see if the fluid goes away on its own. He said it generally happens in 9 out of 10 children. She has a follow-up appointment on June 30th to see what has gone on and if the fluid hasn’t gone away, she will probably need tubes. UGH! We avoided this bullet with Brody and I was hoping the same thing would happen with Molly, but not sure. Hopefully the fluid will disappear and all will be good. We shall see.

Now, I am not feeling so hot. I stayed home with Molly on Tuesday and on Wednesday, I started to have a sore throat and a cough. It has stayed around and while it doesn’t seem to be getting worse, it isn’t getting better. If it is not gone by next week, I will be heading to the doctor to get some meds so I can be good and healthy for our trip.

Friday, April 8, 2011

I really need to blog more......

Yet again, I totally suck at blogging. I swear…I say I am going to be better about it and I totally cherish the fact that I blogged so often the last couple of years because I look back on what I posted all the time. Especially looking to see what Brody did at certain ages and (dare I say) compare him to Molly. There definitely is no comparison. Other then the fact that they were both easy, they are 2 totally different children!


The biggest news right now is that Ted will possibly not be working next week if the Government shuts down, which according to what I have been reading, is inevitable. As of right now, they have about 12 hours to come to some agreement or Ted will be getting on Monday, heading to work to get his furlough papers, and then heading back home! UGH! We were planning to go on a vacation at the end of May for our anniversary, but of course, that has been put on hold because we don’t know what will happen. I am hoping some miracle happens in the next 12 hours and he will still get paid next week.


Other news….Molly has another ear infection. When I took her for her 15 month check-up when I took Brody for his 3 year check up, unbeknownst to me, she had an ear infection in her left ear. Of course, like Brody, she gave me no indication that she was having issues so I had no clue. Well, when the doctor looked back at her other appointments, she has either had an infection or fluid in her ear since January. She prescribed an antibiotic to try and knock it out and said we needed to come back in 2 weeks for a re-check. Well, her re-check was on Tuesday and guess what – the ear that had an infection still had yellow fluid and her right ear was the same way. The other issue is that when we first went back, the nurse did a tympanogram test on her. I don’t remember Brody ever having that done, at least not in the pediatrician’s office, so I was surprised when they did it. The tympanogram tests the middle ear the mobility of the eardrum. It doesn’t assess her hearing, but it measures the eardrum’s response to sound at different pressures. Well, both of her ears came back abnormal which means we are headed to the ENT. I was able to schedule an appointment with the same practice Brody went to on May 5th so we will wait to see what happens. I am hoping that they are able to solve the issue without having to do tubes, which is what happened with Brody. I know that I shouldn’t be freaked out, but anytime someone says a test came back abnormal with my kids, I get a little scared. Then of course, I thought back and remembered that in the hospital, she failed her first hearing test, but passed the second. Of course, in my warped brain, I am already associating the 2 and they probably have nothing to do with each other. So, now we wait. Of course, you take one look at her and have no clue that anything is wrong. She is still her happy go lucky self. Such a lovebug. The following list is just for me because I want to document some of the funny things the kids are doing now:


Brody



  • The other night, I was getting Brody ready for his bath. I told him to take his clothes off and he looked at me and said, “Okay little girl…..little girl named Mommy!” Of course, it is not as funny as I am typing it because the funniest part was the look on his face and the way he said it! It cracked me up.

  • Brody is doing so awesome at school. I definitely think he was more than ready to move up to the next class. When my parents picked him up from school the other day, my Mom asked how he was and his teacher said “Brody is always good!” Makes this Mommy smile. He has been so good the last couple of weeks with listening and doing what he is told. His time-outs have been few and far between and he just seems to have matured so much recently. Crazy to think of him as mature at 3, but I don’t know another way to describe it.

  • I have started to relax a little about his schedule. Anyone that knows me well might be falling out of their chair right now as they are reading this, but yes, it is true. The nap times are limited on the weekend and he is able to fully function with no nap so if he misses it, I am not that worried. We still send him upstairs in his room at his normal nap time, but we let him watch tv and have now referred to it as “rest time.” At night, same thing, but he has been hanging out with us a little more at night and the other night, I actually let him stay downstairs and we watched cartoons and it was 8:00 pm! I know…..sometimes I shock myself. But he is a well-adjusted kid and I have learned that we can modify the schedule a little bit and guess what? The world doesn’t fall apart like I thought! Of course, I can’t say the same thing about Molly’s schedule. She is still too young.

Molly



  • Similar to Brody, Molly is doing really well at school. She has definitely adjusted to going there every morning and I can’t honestly remember the last time she cried when I dropped her off. That used to just be a staple in our morning routine, but not now. I can’t tell that she is picking up more and more language. She can pretty much imitate most words we say to her and has come to call Brody bo-bo. It is pretty cute.

  • At night, for a while, we would bathe her, put her jammies on, and then I would rock her for a few minutes before I put her down at night. She would just lay on me with her head on my chest and those were one of my favorite moments of the day. Well now, or atleast for the past couple of nights, we do the same thing and I will go to sit in the rocker and she will fight to get off of me. Once she is down, she will walk right over to her crib, grab the railing, look at me and say something in her Chinese, and hike a leg up like she wants to get in the crib. The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe it. It was like she was trying to tell me that she was ready for bed. Well, she has started doing it more and more. I guess our rocker time has slowly faded away! That is like a knife to the heart for me because it is yet another sign my little baby girl is growing up! :(

  • Molly definitely loves her brothers. She and Brody play together pretty well, but of course there are those times where they fight. It is crazy to think about a 16 month old and a 3 year old fighting, but trust me it happens. Molly started this new thing last week where she would break out in a high-pitch scream when Brody would take something from her. She is a little feisty……….I think it is pre-cursor of what is to come. She is definitely my more laid back baby, but she has a mean streak in her and as she gets older, I am sure we would find it as cute as we do now at this age.

  • Last weekend, Molly was out in the kitchen while Ethan was emptying the dishwasher. She fell and started crying and I was getting ready to get up and go in there, but Ethan had scooped her up and she immediately stopped crying. It was probably one of the sweetest things ever. She was just staring up at him, with this look on her face that said “Thank you so much for saving my life!” It was adorable! I love those moments….they definitely can not be re-created!

I think that is it for now. I am going to get back to work. I just wanted to take a little brain break and post something since I haven’t posted in a while! Ciao for now! :)

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

A Few Pictures

I don't have many pictures with me here at work, but wanted to post the few that I had! This first one cracks me up because Brody was so excited to eat his Shrek cake!! I just wish the spoon wasn't in the way!



Friday, March 25, 2011

15-Month Comparison

Okay...as the kiddies get older, they are starting to look more and more different. Here is a comparison of both of them around 15 months! Crazy how they both can look so different! Sorry they are both so blurry. They were taken on my phone and then of course I wanted to make it big enough to see. Such cuties!

My Baby Boy is 3

Holy crap people! My baby boy is 3 years old! When did that happen? I have been pretty slack with the blogging lately. Work is absolutely crazy and I am just so tired when I get home that all I want to do is relax and read before I go to bed. But anyway, enough about me!

Brody’s birthday was last Saturday and we decided to do something small at the house. We had my parents, Chris and Rick and the kids, Tab and Mallory, Nana and Grandma Cappy (Tab’s grandma and Mom), and my neighbors and their kids over. I originally wasn’t going to do a theme or anything, but at the last minute, decided I would do Shrek. He LOVES Shrek and has watched it so many times that he recites pieces of the movie. Sad, I know! But anyway, it was a pretty nice day so he was outside playing with the kids and overall, it was a great day! I love the fact that he is growing up, but in the same vein, I hate the fact that he is growing up! One day, my baby boy will be bigger than me, but I can’t think about that stuff right now. I am just going to enjoy these moments and cherish that fact that when he hurts himself or he is sad, Mommy is the one to make him feel better. A bandaid has nothing on Mommy’s kisses! The other night, I was doing some work at home and Ted and I went up to tuck Brody in for bed. I was going to head back downstairs and Ted was going to lay with him for a few minutes. When I said I was going downstairs, Brody clung to me and said “No Mommy. You stay here!” I said “Daddy is going to stay with you!” He said “No, Daddy can go downstairs…..you stay with me!” It definitely made me feel good (although it did upset Ted). Ted headed downstairs and Brody ran and got him and brought him back in the room. It was pretty sweet!

A couple of weeks ago, Brody moved up into the next class at school. I had my parent-teacher conference with his teacher and she said she knew Brody was ready to move up. She said he had mastered everything in her class and he would get bored quickly. Right before they transitioned him, he was acting up too, even at home, so I think he was ready for the challenge. He has been SOOO much better since transitioning and his teachers have said he is doing awesome. Puts a smile on my face, that’s for sure.

So, he had his 3-year check up on Monday. They did his weight and height and then checked his vision. He did so great. They gave him the black cover to put over his one eye and I said “Look Brody. You are a pirate!” He just turned to me, looked up and said, “Arggghhhh!” It was pretty funny. So here are his 3-year stats:

Height – 39 ½ inches (85%)
Weight – 43.8 lbs (<95%) (he did have his shoes and jeans on that day, so I just wanted to make that known) BMI – you ready for this Sarah? 19.7! As I am with all of his appointments, I want to make sure weight isn’t an issue. His pediatrician is the same he has had since he was born so she knows how big he was when he was born. She has always told me that I can’t just go by his weight. He has his Daddy’s body type…….short and stocky. She said that although he is above the curve on the BMI chart, she is not worried about his weight at all. She said he is not overweight because she is considering his body type. She asked what he drank to which I replied “the only thing he drinks is 2% milk, water, and watered-down crystal light. She said that is good. I said he has fruits and veggies with every meal and he NEVER gets sweets. I have always been worried about giving him sweets and since my parents were with me at this appointment, my Dad piped in and said “Yeah, she is a really strict Mommy when it comes to sweets. She is mean and won’t let him have any” I really don’t want to start him down the path of eating that junk so he hardly ever gets any sweets. Call me what you want to call me, but he started off as a big baby and I do not want to be having conversations with his doctor down the road where I have to put my 6 or 7 year old on a diet because he is too heavy. I just feel like he doesn’t necessarily know what he is missing. It also makes it a better surprise when he actually gets to eat some sweets so that is what I focus on! The last thing before we left the doctor was his shot. He needed to get one shot and they decided to do it in his upper arm. They had him sit in my lap and I held him while they did it. She did the shot and Brody tensed up, looked down and just said “Oww!” He didn’t cry and did awesome. They put a bandaid on and sent us on our way.

I am posting this at work while I am taking a break so I will try and post some pictures from Brody’s birthday this weekend. In the mean time, I will leave you with this for a Friday. Brody doesn’t really like for me to take pictures of him anymore, but my Molly is a cheeser. She says “Cheese” when you take her picture and loves the camera. Hopefully that will stick. I will fill you in on her checkup in another post. Hope everyone has a happy Friday!


Wednesday, March 9, 2011

A Picture Says 1,000 Words!

Work is crazy busy, kids were sick last week, and this is how I have been feeling lately.......