Jenny Craig says it’s never too soon. Paige is going on her first diet. You heard me right, our girl is joining thousands of Americans by watching her weight. Who would have thought our 1 pound 10 ounce girl would now have to have her calories reduced? She now weighs 13 pounds 13 ounces.

Cole also had a weight check today. He’s still gaining weight. He now weighs 12 pounds 6 ounces. He has also decided to learn to crawl now. That’s right, he is commando crawling. While he doesn’t get anywhere quick, he certainly does move.

We also met with our physical therapist. Apparently she already knew about us through the blog (who hasn’t read this blog??). Another one of her clients is an avid reader (hello ladies!). So I guess this means we can’t talk bad about her! I kid I kid! She came over and did an evaluation of both babies. It’s kind of funny because I gave Tobie a list of things I’ve noticed about the babies in the morning that I wanted her to discuss with the PT. The PT was spot on with everything we’ve noticed about the babies and then some. I’m looking forward to lots of PT, as each baby needs work in different areas. While Paige will not put weight on her legs, Cole can stand and crawl (ok maybe it’s more of a scoot, ahh heck we’ve been through a lot, dang it my boy can crawl!!). While Cole doesn’t like to sit, Paige can sit up nicely and maintain her balance. Each baby excels in different areas. I know all babies are different, but the older these kids get, the more diverse they become. I always in the back of my mind expected them to develop the same. What do I know?

We also met with the Foundation for the Blind to do an evaluation with Cole. She said Cole looked fantastic (get it, looked? See she works for the foundation for the blind who deals with eyes and…forget it). This is the same gal that helped us with Paige a few weeks ago. We’ve been a little worried about Paige’s eyes. She isn’t behaving like Cole at all when it comes to looking at things. She also noticed that Paige’s eyes were a little off. She she called and got us an appointment next Monday with another eye doctor. I have a feeling we are going to do some patching ASAP. This is our life.

Tobie here: We had a great day today. Lots of playing and smiles. We also had our follow-up appt with the GI doc from our 2nd hospitalization since discharge….remember that one, where Cole wasn’t gaining weight? Anyways, I thought about cancelling since Cole’s been eating much better and he’s being followed by our peed’s office….but this doc was so nice in allowing us to go home (without being AMA) during that stay I decided to keep the appt. The GI doc looked at Cole’s weight and said he looked great.

So sad, yet so happy.

In summary:

Getting babies ready for appt: 30 minutes

Driving to/from appt: 40 minutes

Parking and getting to/from office: 20 minutes in extreme heat

Actual appt time: 5 minutes

Total value of of spending time with another doctor: Priceless

But I shouldn’t complain…finally a good appt. I wonder if the babies associate the car rides with dr appts and eventually they’ll hate going in the car. I wonder if the babies think every time we leave the house they’ll be expected to get naked and be felt up. Just to make them feel better…I took them to McDonalds after the appt. Okay, maybe that was a treat for Mommy…but soon they’ll be screaming for McDonalds as all kids do and I was just trying to get used to caving in.

1. The babies are 217 days old
2. That’s 8 months old people! Update: Apparently I’m not good with numbers, they are just a little more than 7 months old. You can thank this guy for finding the error in my calculation.
3. The babies are 106 corrected days old, so developmentally they should be equivalent to a true muggle 3 1/2 month old baby.
4. To determine Cole’s happiness level, you just have to let him stand up. That should tell you everything you want to know about how he is feeling.
5. To determine Paige’s happiness level, you have to hold her and walk around the house. We’ve dubbed that race the Paige 500. If she isn’t happy while on the track, watch out it’s going to be a rough day.
6. Cole is fascinated with the television. I’m afraid we have opened Pandora’s box.
7. Tobie works 3 nights a week graveyard shift in a blood bank. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Vampire? That would explain her pale complexion. Hi-oooo!
8. We are very close to having 300 blog posts. Whoever thought we would have that much to write about? Oh, it was so rough in the beginning coming up with material!
9. At least once a week we play 6 degrees of separation as everyone coming or going in our lives has somehow read the blog. It’s scary I tell you.
10. Paige has had 2 surgeries: PDA and ROP surgery.
11. Cole has had 3 surgeries: PDA, ROP, and a hernia surgery. Cole always likes to out due his sister. He even decided to have a circumcision for good measure.
12. Tobie’s pregnant again. Okay that’s not true, I just wanted to see if you were still reading. Studies have show that when people read lists, then only read the top ten items. UPDATE 10/2/06: Apparently I wasn’t joking. She is pregnant. When you are good, you’re good!
13. I do appreciate all the comments and support we have received over the past year from family, friends, and of course those people who we don’t know, but know us! In case you are stalking me, if you position yourself just right in the back yard, you can see me in the shower through the southeast window.
14. I’ve taken over 2000 pictures since the babies have been born. Suprisingly you’ve seen the only good ones on the blog.
15. We’ve had close to 700 comments written on the blog. This guy has written most of them.
16. Do you remember the PDA surgery the babies had so long ago? Do you realize they will have a metal clip next to their heart for life? I know, blows the mind!
17. The babies spent 120 days in the NICU.
18. Tobie spent 23 days in the hospital on the strictest bedrest before the birth of the babies.
19. Cole has been admitted to the hospital 3 separate times since being discharged. I think he might be trying to make their wall of fame.
20. My brother and his wife are having their first child, a girl, due next January. Paige will no longer be the only new Kaufman girl breed.
21. Paige has been in the newspaper once.
22. Paige never really lost all her hair. Through thick and thin, she has always kept her mohawk. I already have visions of me yelling at her: “You are not going outside this house with your hair like that”.
23. I think I might be disappointed if the babies grow up and marry non-preemies. Here is a future conversation:
    Paige: Dad, this is Bill, my fiance.
    Me: Well nice to meet you Bill, what do you do for a living?
    Bill: Well I’m an accountant in a big practice on the road to becoming a partner.
    Me: That’s wonderful, so were you born full-term?
    Bill: Umm…yes.
    Me: Get out of my house and never come back!
    Paige: Dad how could you, I’ll never talk to you again! I hate you I hate you!
    So to avoid that future conversation, I’ve already got the babies betrothed. Paige has been promised to this fine young gentleman. Cole’s been promised to two girls, we’re just hoping it’s legal in 20 years. Nice!
24. Did you know next week between doctor’s visits and therapies, we are going to be seeing at least 2-3 medical type people each day of the week?
25. We’ve gone out to eat once alone in the past 3 months.
26. Cole has eaten more than his minimum the past 2 days. Is this the start of something good?
27. The last movie Tobie and I saw in the theaters together was Harry Potter last November.
28. Paige really doesn’t mind sitting in a dirty diaper.
29. Cole has actually tried to stab me with a knife because I didn’t change his diaper quick enough.
30. Tobie and I have a weird addiction for the show Big Brother. Sinful I know!
31. Paige is such an eating machine that one time (no, not at band camp) I accidentally had formula on my pinky finger and she took 1/4 of my finger off with her mouth as she sucked the formula from it. Her suck is so incredibly strong as her feeds are super duper thick (almost Jamba Juice thick).
32. Even though Paige is a little more than a pound heavier than Cole, she feels sooooo much heavier. I think there might be some temporal time thing going on, like the tardis (yes another Dr. Who reference, will the geekiness ever stop? See the tardis is a small 1960’s police box on the outside, but on the inside it’s this gigantic craft. So in my comparison, Paige is this small baby on the outside, but on the inside..never mind I think I lost you at tardis.
33. After talking to Aunt Sharyn, we’ve come to the conclusion we aren’t cursed but blessed. She is so wise.

So Cole isn’t sick. It seems that we were given the wrong medication from the pharmacy. Instead of giving Cole his normal diuretic, the pharmacy had given us diazepam. Basically diazepam is valium. No I’m not messing with you. We had given Cole 3 doses before we realized the inconsistency with the pharmacy labels. This was our 4th or 5th refill of this drug from the pharmacy. The bottle, color, and consistency of the liquid looked the same as his normal diuretic. So remember the other night when we thought Cole was getting sick? Well it was the start of his body having an adverse reaction to this drug. So let’s break down the day of hell (someone prove to me we aren’t cursed, go ahead, I dare you!).

Cole was very irritable during the night. We had assumed it was him outgrowing his O2 because Paige kind of acted the same way when she wanted off the O2. Well that attitude carried over into the day. In fact he was getting worse. When I had come home for work early, I was almost in tears as I’ve never seen Cole look so sad before. He was definitely in pain. Of course we realized right away Cole was getting worse so we called the peed’s office to get us in there ASAP. We had seen a doctor that hadn’t seen us before. Upon examining Cole she diagnosed him with an infection. After the fact, we know he doesn’t have an infection. Should the doctor have realized something else was going on and he wasn’t sick? Did the side effects from the drug mask like an infection? I’m not sure. You kind of lose a little faith in the process though. Will we second guess everything going forward? I don’t know, only time will tell. So anyways, it wasn’t till around 7 pm last night that we realized he was taking the wrong medication. I’ve never seen Cole more miserable.

The first thing we do is call poison control as we really didn’t know what we were dealing with. They were pretty good with everything. They said that since he wasn’t showing the scary side effects (like troubles with his central nervous system), that he should be flushing it out of his system shortly. Well I felt a tad better after talking to them. After that phone call we called our on-call nurse. She was absolutely shocked this happened. She immediately called the on-call peed. The on-call peed immediately called the on-call poison control doctor. Apparently Cole was given twice the amount of diazepam that they would normally give a baby that size (obviously for a baby that would need a drug like this). They wanted us to go immediately to the hospital for observation. Ugh! The good news is we could go to Scottsdale North, so at least we could get a private room this time (and it’s right down the street). Well that’s what we thought until they called us back saying we had to go to Children’s again. Apparently there was a counter drug we could give Cole. Tobie was perfectly clear that if she was going to to go the hospital, they would actually do something. Last time we went to the hospital, they didn’t do jack s@#t. We can observe Cole just fine from home because we have the O2, we have the pulse ox, we have the heart rate monitor, we have the apnea monitor, and of course we know Cole better than anyone else. So Tobie ends up packing up the gear and heads to Children’s with Cole in the middle of the night.

This is where we have one of those “and this is our life” type of moments. Tobie walks in the emergency room with Cole and is immediately whisked away from all the waiting room germs! First off I think we need to say that the emergency room team did an absolute fantastic job processing us. Tobie was very impressed with how great everyone was. So Tobie ends up seeing the doctor there and she is fully aware of our case since our peed called ahead. So here is the weird thing, they don’t want to give Cole the counter drug to the diazepam. The doctor talked to the poison control doctor and they both feel it might trigger something else, so they decided not to administer it. Hold on, wait a minute, the peed had already cleared with the poison control doctor that we were to receive this drug. After all that’s the only reason we were coming to the hospital. So what has changed? Well it turns out that somehow, our peed was routed to poison control in Washington State. Oh my. The Phoenix poison Control doctor did not want to give the drug (is Arizona more cautious that Washington State or vice versa?). So the only reason we went to the hospital was so they could actually treat Cole. Since they do not want to give Cole the counter drug, there is nothing they can do for him so they send him home to let his body flush it out naturally. Now do you see how this is one of those “this is our life” moments?

So where do we stand now? Well we are tired. We are emotionally drained, frustrated to say the least. We are upset with ourselves. We are upset with the system. Cole is still not himself and until he is we will not feel better about anything. Our new peed (who was awesome) basically said we got lucky, very lucky. I have to say that our lives have definitely been on the tragic side for the past 9 months. It just seems like we can’t our feet under ourselves. Every other week it seems like we are fighting some new unnecessary obstacle. In just a few months we’ve been through more emotional roller coaster rides than most people have in their entire lifetime. Most of you have read our life story. Well our life story as it started 9 short months ago. Having said that, this experience was probably one of the worst experiences we have gone through and we have seen it all. Seeing our happy, spunky, full of life Cole down, in pain, and crying out for help was the absolute worst. I cannot think of any words that truely describe what we felt when we saw our little guy trying to stand, not able to smile or keep his head up. The feeling of absolute helplessness is the absolute worst feeling you can have as a parent. Knowing we were the ones who gave him the wrong medication, oh you have know idea how we feel.

So I already know what you all are going to say: You can’t blame yourselves. How could this happen? It should have never happened. Cole could have died. You need to move forward. You got lucky! Who is to blame?. You should sue the pants off them.

One of our readers, my friend, is a lawyer who we have already fully aware of the situation. So don’t worry about that. Unfortunately the story is a little more complicated than I’m willing to discuss in this forum. So moving forward, Cole will hopefully be “Classic Cole” again tomorrow. For the time being we will just leave it at that. I’m probably missing a lot of the details from the past 40 hours. Oh well, such is life. I just want to move forward and have our little boy back. Oh how I want normal muggle issues. Give me some craddle cap, colic, or heck even a diaper rash at this point they would be a welcome problem, oh wait we do have diaper rash. Whatever I’m done.

Update 8/11: Just our luck, Tobie was sick all night. Her body had shut down from the week of hell. I’m hoping her body will rebound quickly. Cole still isn’t himself. This sucks.

Tobie took Cole to the hospital tonight. They are going to keep him there overnight. It’s a “you are not going to believe this” type of story. I’ll share with you all later once everyone is back home together safe and sound. Hopefully Cole and Tobie will be back home sometime tomorrow.