We Like To Party!

Friday was the trios b-day. During the day they opened gifts from my parents, us, and our good friends the Shigley's. They had a lot of fun with the wrapping paper, bows, and cards!
Friday afternoon B.J.'s parents came for the weekend to celebrate the kids b-day. Friday night the trio had their b-day cupcakes, it was a site to see!





Saturday we had the trios 2nd b-day party. This year we went with Mickey and Minnie themed, it was quite cute because my sister had gotten the kids their “my 1st” Mickey/Minnie hats at Disney so they were able to wear them. The kids did great, all three loved the cake this year, Annabel mostly frosting. The kids weren’t really in to opening gifts on Saturday, I think they had opened enough on Friday. It was fun to have everyone over, so many of the kids are close in age, it was neat to see them all playing together!


Sunday we took the kids to the Fowlerville fair. This is a very nice, clean fair. They all rode on the choo-choo train and loved it, Annabel sat the whole time like the big girl that she is, I hardly had to hold on to her at all!
We walked thru the animal barns(lambs were their favorite, although Mady was also pretty interested in the horses, calling them all "baby"), and we had fair fries – pack on those calories!

Now for appointment updates. Last Friday I took Johnathan to pulmonary. His lungs are great, however, they’re not happy that he didn’t gain more since his last appointment (he’s in the 3rd percentile for height to weight ratio). On our scale at baths that night he weighed 20lbs 13ozs (he was 20lbs 6ozs and 31 ½ inches at the appointment in the a.m.), Annabel weighed 20lbs 1 1/2ozs, and Mady weighed 20lbs 6ozs. The thing that’s frustrating is that they want us to load them up with these additives to the milk (carnation instant) but honestly think they’d eat more solids if they weren’t filling up on the milk! When they did a 3 day eating study a month or so ago he was getting more calories than he even needed to grow and he’s now eating and drinking more! In a child’s 2nd year of life they’re supposed to gain around 5lbs, well guess what? He did!! The girls actually gained more! What’s frustrating is a) he looks healthy and is healthy, b) he’s now more active, especially with being outside more, c) I am a smaller person and always have been so why can’t it just be genes?, and d) he’s a micro-preemie!! Plus, I’ve talked to so many parents lately whose kids are small like mine and none of them had their doctors recommend adding additives. I understand that Johnathan especially is a bit more at risk because of his lung disease, although the last lung function test showed that his are growing and healing nicely but looking at him day-to-day, he looks great and he no longer breathes heavier when playing hard or laughing hard so we’re obviously doing something right! We have the kids 2 year well child next Friday so we’ll see what our pediatrician says. It was just a very frustrating appointment! And to hear it all on his b-day, I was just so proud that he’s 2 and overall doing great!

This afternoon I took Johnathan to audiology to try to find out what is going on with his hearing aids since he has not been wanting to leave them in lately. The audiologist first checked to make sure there wasn’t any fluid or excess wax in his ears (children who wear hearing aids have quite a bit of wax anyway) and there wasn’t. She then verified that we still had the right ear mold with the right hearing aid and vice versa for left, which we did so the final step was to do a hearing test. She tested without his hearing aids and the results are that if anything he tested better than he did in his previous test! The only thing we concluded is that the tubes on the hearing aids weren’t cut quite short enough so maybe the fact that it was flopping around bothered him, or the more likely culprit is those terrible twos – the audiologist has seen many kids regress with wearing them when going thru this phase. Yippee!! So we’ll just have to work on enforcing him to keep them in again, she did say to call if it hasn’t gotten any better in a week, hopefully it won’t come to that. If all goes well Johnathan won’t need to see audiology until October! What a relief today's appointment was, I was so worried that what he was showing was going to end up being a reflection of the genetic testing the doctors have been looking in to. Thank you Dear God that it wasn't!!