Adventures in Parenting

  Tuesday, E had his MRI. The hospital staff was much better prepared for working with children than our previous hospital. E was even given a light up toy to take home. He was very unhappy about being poked and prodded, but he was the most upset by the blood pressure cuff that was placed on his leg. He is so easy going with so many things, but he clearly hates anything that hinders his freedom to move around.

  The testing went well and E took a while to wake up in recovery. The test coincided with his usual nap time, so even after the medication was no longer in his system, he was still interested in sleeping. He would wake briefly, take a sip of juice, then drop right back off to sleep. When he did wake fully, he was still very groggy. It was really hilarious and I wish we had filmed it :-) E would smile and laugh and the laugh would come out "haa haa Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa." If a voice was dubbed in, you could have imagined him saying, "I love you man...no really...I know I don't tell you this often, but I really love you dude." After seeing him sign, "more cookie please," the nurse told us that he had a 16-month-old at home and asked us how he could begin signing with his son. He was very impressed by E's ability to communicate with us at his age. I love that E is becoming a little ambassador for teaching sign language to babies!

  E did well with juice and animal crackers after recovery and so we were told that we could go ahead and give him some milk. Bad idea. About an hour down the road, E suddenly rejected the milk. There was nowhere to pull over, so I was out of my seat, leaned into the back seat, trying desperately to clean up my child and his car seat. E was fine and asking for more juice, but now the car smelled like spoiled milk. Every parent out there knows that smell. It's not something you will forget. We stopped as soon as we found a Target and went in to buy him a new outfit. He wanted to be held of course, so I was having to walk around holding a wet, smelly baby. I love him so much, but he reeked! We found an outfit on clearance since they had already put away all of their summer clothes and changed E when we got back out to the car. Crisis averted! One new outfit and a ton of baby wipes later, we were all clean and back on the road. At the end of the day, we were exhausted parents, but E was running on all 8 cylinders  
and happy as always.

  Now, for a bit of good news....our deck is finished! Thank you SO much to the men from our church that volunteered their time to help us build a new, safe deck. The new deck is BEAUTIFUL and E really loves playing outside on it.

Lovely New Deck

"I LOVE IT!"

E playing with his ghetto sandbox (don't judge)

  We got another bit of news when we got home from the MRI. Advanced Bionics is back on the market with their cochlear implant. This was very good news since Cochlear just issued a voluntary recall on their newest internal component. Cochlear is also still available, but they are recommending that the new processor be used with the previous model implant, which seems less than favorable to me. So now, all three brands are available in some capacity. The innovative new water proof processor being developed by Advanced Bionics is also expected to hit the market very soon. Hopefully, E will have some really great choices when it is his turn to be implanted!