Ding Dong...

Ding Dong The Wicked Witch is Dead....

Can you guess why that song has been stuck in my head today? 

(Please note that I am not calling my son the wicked witch, I just had to laugh when I walked back into E's room this morning and saw this)

 Apparently playing on top of the play mat is sooo yesterday!

In other Elliot News/Pictures

Bath time has become so much fun with him. Ever since he found out that splashing in his tub makes me laugh we play lots of games during bath time. 

Even though he isn't quite crawling he can sure get to where he wants to be. I put him down over by the teddy bear and came back a minute later and he had rolled himself over to the rock n play and was trying to tackle it. Crawling isn't far from our future, and I can't decide how I feel about that. He can get up on his hands and knees and will move either his hands or his legs but hasn't figured out how to do both at the same time!

The best news of the week is that we have finally had some success in Operation: Sleep in the Crib. He now only takes about 20-30 minutes to settle himself down for naps and will sleep for a little while. It is so great to see progress!

New things

I love watching Elliot learn new things. It seems these days there are new things to brag about every day! Some good, some bad. He's learning how to sit by himself, how to grow razor sharp teeth to bite with (ouch!!!) how to play on his stomach without getting mad at the world, how to pull himself over to the wall while I'm changing his diaper so he can scratch the wall and flake paint off in the process, to give bear hugs and kisses. What we've been working on this week is how to sleep in a crib (during naps, I've been entirely too selfish to give up my nights so far - bad mamma). Yikes, I knew it was going to be tough, but this week has just sucked. After so many hours of crying, snuggles, researching new techniques to sleep train, and hoping he isn't going to hate me later in life we've gotten only a few 20 minutes naps out of him. Translation: overly tired baby and stressed out mom. Yesterday was our best nap - a whole 30 minutes!- and I took a picture of him sleeping in his pack n play just so I could remember how peaceful he looked and to keep me moving forward in this frustrating process.

Another new thing he is learning this week is to use a sippy cup. He sort of gave up bottles again so I thought I would pick one up in the store and try it. He loves it! Still not super great at it, but it is really cute to watch him!

I can't wait to see what new things he learns next - like the fake cry he has going on right now... oh joy!

Lately....

I know I've been MIA in the blog world for quite a while. Sorry about that. But here is a quick recap of what life has been like lately.

We're still working on getting settled into the new house. I hadn't taken any pictures because I haven't gotten the house to a point where I like to show it off, but I don't think we'll get there for awhile. So here are a few "as-is" pictures from this morning.

What little boy doesn't need 4 beds in his room? We had him sleep in his rock in play (that's where he is in this picture) because of our nomad status for the first chunk of his life, but now he refuses to sleep laying flat in his crib or pack n play. Any advise on how to transition him to his crib? I'm at a loss. I've tried letting him play with toys until he falls asleep, crying himself to sleep, laying him down while he is asleep - but he wakes up instantly and freaks out. I need to figure something out soon because he is quickly outgrowing the rock n play.

This is what I'm greeted with in the mornings. Reason #5753367 why I love him - He sleeps from 9:30pm - 8:00am and then gives me the best "I missed you and am so excited to see you" smiles when I walk in.

In between getting settled in and working on the never ending to-do list we've enjoyed some good down time as a family

Elliot is enjoying his new big boy highchair and learning to eat rice cereal. He is also working on pushing his bottom two teeth out/leaving a trail of drool behind him.  Sigh he's getting way to big already.

So that's our life in a nutshell - enjoying having our own place, enjoying our summer (lake time this weekend - YEAH!!!!!) and most of all enjoying our little/growing too fast Elliot.

House Progress

It's been awhile since I updated with what we've been up to at the new house. We took a couple of weeks off with all Elliot's health issues, but we're getting back into the swing of things. 

We've gotten the bedrooms just about finished with paint. Now we're ready to start trim. I'm not sure if I've put this angle of the master bedroom up. This shows the living room, then we have our closet, a small linen closet and our bathroom.

Elliot's room. Two walls have the stripes and the other two are just the brown color.

Guest room. 

Before the craziness of life hit Bryce and his friend Dan got the floor in the main living area down. It looks great. While we were stuck in the hospital our carpets and appliances arrived. It was so much fun to come home to a house that felt so much more like a home! We were even able to take our shoes off inside the house for the first time! What a great feeling!!

Now that I have these shiny new appliances it makes me even more excited to get the cupboards whipped into shape. I can't decide if I want to go with dark cupboards to show off the stainless steel, or keep it light to match the woodwork. Thoughts?

A closer look at the floors

It's not going to be too much longer before we can start moving our things in, and we cannot wait!

We're Home!!!!!!!

Well I think the title says it all. We finally got discharged yesterday afternoon, and man were we ready. We had to sit around and wait for his blood thinner medicine do its thing and give us the magic numbers. And yesterday the Xa levels reached .5 which is the lowest number in the therapeutic range but hey its enough to let us get discharged. We found out at 1:00 pm and then had to wit around until 5:00 p.m. for all his medicine to get filled at the pharmacy and the discharge papers to get finished.

While at home we will give his antibiotic through his PICC once a day, sodium supplements twice a day (basically salt water we have to force him to swallow), and inject his Lovenox (blood thinners) twice a day. In addition we get to go to the lab twice a week for blood draws to monitor all his levels to make sure his kidneys are doing their job, So its a lot but if it makes E better it is worth it. We will also do a quick follow up in the cities in a month and then in three months do a full fledged follow up with ultrasounds and meet with the nephrologist and urologist too.

Thank you again for all your prayers and messages and support. It was such a scary and stressful time but we definitely saw God's hand of guidance and protection through it all!

Wednessday Update

I was really hoping that we would be done with these updates by now and all snuggled in back home resting up. Doesn't look like that is the case for a few more days.

Elliot was put on the OR schedule as a fill in again. Meaning we had to stop feeding him at 3:00 am and just wait to see when they call us down. That sucks. Majorly. It is one thing to deal with a crying baby during the day and a whole different ball game when it is 5 in the morning you have barely slept and all your baby wants to do is eat and you can't do a single thing about it. Once morning rolls around life seems a little easier. We were able to get some more sugar water to pacify him and we played with toes and toys and he flirted with more nurses. Good news this morning is that his morning labs show that his infection markers are down to the 20's where they had been well over 200. So we are pretty pumped that this infection is almost all the way out of his little body!!

We got called down to the OR around 1045, did the pre-op thing and he was brought back to the OR around 1130. Bryce and I walked around outside for a little bit and it was the first time I had been outside since Friday when I drove down here. It was so nice to get a breath of fresh air and walk around in the little garden area they have here. The best part were the lilacs lining the paths, beautiful! We came and hung out in the waiting area and finally a little after 1:00 the Dr. came and talked to us. The good news: the PICC went in great on the first try. The bad news: They did a ultrasound to look at the clot while in there and it was a little larger than they would have liked and closer to the main vein to let them leave it alone. So now we are getting the Hematology gurus involved in the equation. We will start him on twice daily shots of blood thinners to help his body break up and dissolve this clot and hopefully decrease his chance of getting another clot that compromises his new PICC. He will be on these shots for 3 months so we get to go find out not only how to shoot medicine into his blood stream but now we add medicine sub-cutaneously!Oh the joys!! He will get his first shot this evening and we have to hang out here until after his Friday morning shot and do some more labs to see if levels are where they should be, then home - theoretically!   It's a good thing that there is a laundry facility in the building as we are here way longer than either of us anticipated. As frustrating as all these setback are we feel more comfortable here getting things checked out than going home now when things are still in the unknown category.

Monday/ Tuesday Update

Sorry I didn't get to update yesterday. It was such an exhausting day that the computer just didn't make a high priority.

Yesterday we had Elliot on the OR board as a fill in so he couldn't eat all day just so he would be ready whenever they could squeeze him in. He did surprisingly well with that. We tried to keep him asleep as much as possible just so he wouldn't be aware of how log it had been since he had eaten. We also kept him hopping with different tests. In the morning we went down to Nuclear Medicine and had a renal scan with Lasiks. We had had this test done before, so it wasn't anything new. In a nutshell they pump him with a low dose radioactive dye and take pictures every couple of seconds to watch how his kidneys process and dump the blood. Thankfully he slept through half of it.  We got back into our room and were told that we were on the OR board for 230 so we had just a few minutes to grab lunch and get ready to go down to pre-op. We got pretty excited and pretty soon 230 came around and we were still in our room. The nurse came in a bit later and said that we got pushed back to 630.  just about left then. That is already over 12 hours for my baby to go on nothing but some sugar water on his pacifier. We got brought down to imaging for his renal ultrasound, and that helped pass a little bit of time until his procedure. Finally we got the ok to be brought down. We spent a few minutes in pre-op and met the doctors and nurses that would be working on him. He had to get a PICC line in. A more permanent port for us to give his antibiotics to him for the next week or so. The urologist also did a quick look with a scope and he had a minor other procedure as well since he was going to be put under. Everything went well. The urologist came and gave us the great news that he is almost positive that he will out grow the hydroneprosis!!! After all the worst case scenarios that were thrown our way we were almost not expecting for the best case to come into reality. We were able to breathe such a sigh of relief. Just do some follow up ultrasounds in a few months but as soon as the infection clears up we are in the clear. We were back in the room by 900 and E was having a rough time. The scope makes it very painful to pee, so he would be resting comfortably and then wake up crying in pain. Thankfully the nurse stayed right on top of the meds to control the pain as best as we could. We had a pretty fitful night sleep. E would sleep best with one of us holding him so as you can imagine not much sleep has had by anyone!

Today, we were told that there was a possibility of getting to come home. He has been fever free for oer 24 hours the infection was going down and so life was looking good. We went to a class of how to administer the iv meds, which is crazy scary. Knowing that you are shooting things right into your sons blood stream next to his heart is more than a little daunting. When we got back from the class we were told that the nurse was concerned with his PICC. His hand was turning a little blue and had puffed up a bit. We got another ultrasound done a little bit ago and found out that there is a clot inside the line. which means that that PICC needs to come out and we need to get scheduled for another surgery to get a replacement one put back in. It doesn't seem likely that it will be today as we are already far into the afternoon so we will be staying put for a little while longer. Even though we were told that today might be a possible discharge day we were anticipating being here at least through Wednesday, but to hear it for sure is a little disappointing. But we are thankful that the clot was found early and that it can be taken care of quickly.