Walking in a Winter Wonderland...

Okay, so a bit of a stretch since I will not be doing much walking outside today, but this is what greeted us this morning.  Like any good child, Lorelei was of course delighted.  Her parents?  Not so much.

Lorelei has been sick the past few days with occasional fevers and the onset of a cold.  She is finally well enough to return to school today.  She got to have too much fun the past two days (thanks to daddy & her uncle), but since she wanted to play in the snow was willing to return to school.
It's been a busy time for us.  I won't go into much detail, but let's just say I'm not a big fan of Nit Picking, but am very glad it has remained isolated to one person.  And really, as frustrating as it is...it really isn't as 'bad' as I thought...lots of myths abound...

On another note, Ethan had the longest day of appointments on Friday.  He got a pneumonia immunization and then had to have blood work done because they will be running tests to check out his immune system.  Then he had to wait for his oncology appointment, they were running over three hours late.  It has been a LONG time since we actually attended that clinic and we don't have to go back for another year.  Especially since there are no real concerns...  It took just about the whole day for those appointments.  Oh, and I also let them take a bit extra blood for a genetic study on drug reactions.  They are trying to find out if responses to things (IE: Ethan's reactions to morphine) are genetic, so I also gave them some DNA to work with. 

On Monday, we met with our Speech Language Pathologist, OT and someone from Augmentative Communications to try to devise a good strategy to help Ethan express himself.  It seemed to go pretty well and everyone was excited about moving forward.  We are going to be working more with pictures/symbols for now.

Yesterday we were back at the hospital for Ethan's pre-admit appointment.  And provided nothing seriously changes - he's good to go for the 7th.  :)  He was also seen by his cardiologist who believes that Ethan's small ASD has sealed, but otherwise not much has changed so does not need to see Ethan for another year.  Ethan also had an ECG done and they determined his heart sounds/works normally.  :)  I love hearing that word associated with Ethan.

So What Else is New?

When I started to write this post it had been 6 weeks since we saw the specialist for a second opinion on how to treat Ethan's scoliosis and the letter had finally arrived at our local surgeon's office.  The surgeon stayed true to what he told us when we were there, he wrote pretty much exactly what he'd said.  Then we waited for word from our surgeon as to when/how to proceed.  Waiting is so hard!  We finally saw the surgeon again almost 8 weeks after the second opinion and (drum roll please)... we will be casting Ethan again.  He is due to be casted on December 7th.  Please keep him in your thoughts that he remains well enough to be casted on that date.

While we were waiting he had the chance to mostly recovered from his recent illness.  He woke up one morning about 2 weeks ago around 5:30 am with a loose stool that got us out of bed to clean him up.  Then as Clayton was repositioning Ethan, Ethan's mic-key got pulled out and we had to rush around to get that back in quickly.  It seems we had a leaky balloon.  Ethan went back to sleep and then woke up just after 8 am vomiting.  By the time I headed to work around 9:30, he'd been sick 5 times, had a fever and was lethargic.  He remained feverish throughout the day, but the Tylenol was able to break it between doses.  From then he seemed to get over that part and into a cold-like symptoms.  Thanks to his sleep deprivation techniques, I then did not rest enough and managed to catch his cold as well.  We're both on the mend now...thankfully!

Lorelei has had an interesting time lately as well.  She lost 4 teeth in about a 2 week period.  It started with some bottom ones that were super loose and then the top front tooth got all crooked.  She lost one on the bottom and the next day out came the top tooth with a little help from Lorelei...

Shortly after numbers 3 and 4 came out as well.  Now she can sing "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth" and really mean it.  :)

Belated Happy Halloween!

Although Halloween has come and gone, I thought I would share a few pictures of how we celebrated.  On the 30th, I realized we still had not picked up a pumpkin to carve...so off we went in search of one last minute.  We went to 3 different grocery stores before finally heading to a local farm.  Of course we paid a bit more, but I think Lorelei & Clayton made a great choice.

This year Lorelei wanted to help out a lot more and as you can see in the background (top right corner)...Ethan was busy playing on the floor with some of his toys.

We did have him join us for some sensory with the pumpkin seeds.  He reacted better than we anticipated.  We thought he would hate the feeling of the pumpkin guts, but he did not seem to mind them too much.  He of course was doing his best to pick them up from my hand and toss them elsewhere.  After Lorelei and I picked out all the seeds, I tried to see how he liked the feel of the raw seeds alone, but he was less willing to participate.

Lorelei just loved getting her hands dirty in the pumpkin guts...but did run to the bathroom a couple times in between to rinse her hands.

It was a lot of work to get all the seeds out, but we did it.  And I tried my hand at baking the seeds for the first time.  Add a little bit of oil, onion salt, garlic, sea salt and presto... 

They actually turned out pretty tasty.  :)

Another first this year, I dressed up and applied some face paint.  I often react to make up so just put on a little bit.  Not too bad for my first time.

I also had a neat cat tail that gave me a better perspective of what it must be like to tote one along with you all day.  The one time I sat on it, it was quite uncomfortable so I made sure to sweep it to the side each time.

Lorelei agreed to wear the same costume as last year, but I tried to spice it up a bit with face paint for her as well.  Right after school I got busy with the face paint before supper and had her ready to go trick-or-treating...and of course she ended up smudging up some of the make-up.  At least I was smart enough to take a picture when I finished applying it.

We did not coordinate things well enough this year to get Ethan dressed up in a costume and because of the rain we did not take him out.  He was somewhat dressed for the day though.

I hope everyone had a great Halloween!