Paige:  Hard to tell if her surgery worked.  She is still cocking her head an awful lot but that may be a habit that takes a while to break.  Her eyes were bloodier yesterday than the day of surgery and it was painful to look at her.  She is not in any apparent discomfort though and was playing harder than ever yesterday. (Eric here:  Aunt Amy, since we have cured Paige’s bad sleeping, I won’t need to talk to your doctor friend.  Thank you though for thinking of us.)

Cole:  Got the results of half of his lab work yesterday.  Everything falls within normal range except his CO2 levels.  ???  They said this could be a result of a bad phleb stick.  But Cole was an absolute angel getting his blood drawn and it did not appear to me that the tech had any difficulty drawing his blood.  I need to ask the peed about this.  Because if he’s still not breathing well…that could account for a loss of appetite.  Again…if he’s not breathing well no one would ever know because the kid is NON-STOP!  Our neurodevelopmental doc called the other day and wants him to see an ENT to get the fluid out of his ears.  Our peed wanted to just wait it out.  But with Cole’s speech delays the neuro doc wants to be proactive.  I’m in favor of waiting it out because I don’t want to go through any more procedures if this is something time will heal.  We’ll see.

Drew:  Cute as ever.  Babbling like crazy.  Likes to fake cough.  Started participating in therapy yesterday by putting puzzle pieces in puzzles.  (Smartest baby ever!)  He’s playing so well with P and C….it’s making my life a lot easier!

Moxie:  Her tumor erupted on the back of her neck again yesterday.  I can’t explain how disgusting that is.  It makes me gag.  Not to mention this huge chunk of skin, puss, and hair that I picked off the floor where her explosion landed.  Picture for a second (if you can without throwing up in your mouth) how gross it would have been if oh, say Drew, found that mass before I did.  Uughh.  I just gagged.

Nikki:  Since you never call me back:  just wanted to let you know that the cube that plays rhymes is our favorite Christmas present.  All of them love it and I sing five little monkeys in my sleep now.  Thanks!

I’m writing this blog today so I can appear busy and hopefully P and C will leave me alone and go off and play on their own.  Right now they are hanging on my legs just yelling at the top of their lungs indecipherable things.  And then they’ll repeat them over and over like they are really trying to tell me something.  Uuggh.  I am so ready to get over this communication barrier.  I could drive myself insane trying to figure out what they’re saying.  And they are soooooo LOUD.  I think we’re getting in the habit of outshouting each other.  No wonder Drew barely talks.  I’ve tried whispering so maybe they’ll start whispering, but then I think they try to compensate for my quietness by taking it up a notch.  Kill me.  Remind me to see if Eric can post a video from Stewie on Family Guy.

So we started the day off bad today.  Cole (my normally dreamy sleeper) has been wakening before the others this last week.  For naps and to start the day.  This is so unusual and we’ve never had a problem with this before.  Normally Paige wakes up first and 50% of the time she will scream/cry and inevitably wake Cole up in the process.  But there are those 50% of the time where she will walk out of her room to find someone and be happy as could be.  Cole is still in his crib so he scream/cries LOUDLY until someone gets him out of his crib and 100% of the time wakes up Paige.  I’m so tempted to put him in a toddler bed like Paige so that way if he gets up first he can allow her to wake up on her own.  I just don’t know if we’re 100% ready for that transition, because we all know that once you cross that bridge there’s no going back.  It would make naptime a nightmare trying to keep two toddlers in their beds.  But Paige is pretty cranky if she doesn’t get her beauty sleep and Cole could wake up a lot nicer if he could just waddle himself on out of his own bed.  Decisions, decisions.

So we had another play therapist start with us on Friday.  It was her first and last visit.  She has a PhD in something (which she must have mentioned twenty times) and she told me this was a very temporary postion for her.  This was about 45 minutes into our hour visit.  Then she started blowing her nose and told me she was getting over a cold.  Thanks.  I’m calling the company rep tomorrow and discontinuing services with the play therapists.  This was our fourth? play therapist and all the ones that are assigned to us leave after a month because the pay is not decent.  We don’t really need play therapists anyways.  This one on Friday had no child development experience and no children of her own.  Thanks, but no thanks.

Probably one reason I’m having a rough go this morning is that I am out of my Starbuck frappuccinos.  I need Eric to wake up so I can go for a coffee run.  It just doesn’t seem worth it to load all the kids into the car to hit the Starbucks drive-thru.  Maybe it is.  Give me another ten minutes.  And if I use my awesome Starbucks giftcard from my father-in-law, it’s not really breaking my New Years Resolution because technically I’m not buying for myself, right?

Oh….another note:  Paige and Cole learned yesterday to jump into the pool standing on the edge.  How cool is that?  It’s going to be a fun swimming summer.  Okay….got to go Drew is done with breakfast and I need to keep looking busy so the kids will self-entertain until I get my morning fix.

Just received our acceptance letter for preschool in fall.  Looks like all our hard work and extracurricular activities, volunteer work and such, qualified us to get admitted in fall.  Whoopee!!  How many days until August 18th??  And isn’t that conception week? 

We had a GI appt for Cole yesterday.  I don’t particularly care for our GI appts.  This time we were able to see our original GI doc.  He was “too busy” to follow us on a regular basis after a couple of our first original appts and passed us off to his nurse practicioner.  She was nice enough, though I feel she didn’t listen to us either.  Well, now we’re back to our main guy and he was not amused by Cole’s weight yesterday.  The boy has not grown at all in the last six months despite being on high calorie formula.  I’m not shocked.  He looks a lot smaller than Paige and boys are supposed to be bigger than girls at this age.  So he is short and thin.  Supposedly your height can not advance unless you have the weight (you need to get wider before you get longer…..am I going to shoot up like a bean stalk soon?  :))  So now the GI doc wants to look at digestive problems with Cole.  Geez.  Eric said “isn’t that what we wanted a long time ago?”.  yes.  But now here we are almost a year later getting the testing done.  We’ll go tomorrow.  They are going to look at his pancreas and stomach.  My parents asked what they would do if they found something.  I didn’t ask.  The doctor also said if the results are normal he wants to reconsider the NG tube down the nose for nighttime feeds.  I told him there was no way Cole or I would be okay with that.  He would rip that tube out in a millisecond.  Not to mention that it would kill me to do that to him every night.  The doctor said there were long-term outcomes if Cole doesn’t start growing soon.  Again I didn’t ask what those were because I was trying to juggle three kids at an appt right at their lunch/naptime.  So I’m left with a lot of questions but thankfully GI is on top of things and will be seeing us soon.  Oh that’s right…I’m talking about GI…..yeah, they’re not seeing us for another three months!!!!!  That’ll potentially be nine months of no growth for Cole.  Fantastic.

We started practicing finding Easter eggs today.  The kids LOVED it and I am confident they are going to have a blast on Easter.  We just need to make sure we have plenty of chocolate to fill those plastic eggs with!!!  I was even getting pretty tricky with some eggs and Cole was finding them pretty fast.  Paige not so much…but she is more on the CEO level making Cole and Drew find the eggs then rip them out of their hands. 

Lastly, Eric and I are going on a date tonight.  I know, I know…it’s not even our anniversary!!!  We’re just doing it because we can and should!!!  Yippee!