First off, Eden.
She's great. Up to 17# and some change, about 30 inches long, growing to everyone's satisfaction. She's happy and healthy and gets compliments everywhere she goes. Seriously. Everywhere. I can't walk through a grocery store without at least one person saying "Oh, what a beautiful baby!" or trying to get her attention and make her smile. It's SUCH a trial.
Last we heard from the doctor was in August and she wanted to get outside opinions from doctors in New York (Columbia) and at Stanford. She hasn't heard from them yet because first it was her vacation, then it was theirs, and now she's trying to get everything together to send to everyone. She's also decided to send everything to a doctor at Boston Children's Hospital. So, three major hospitals in the US will be looking at Eden's scans and charts and coming to a decision. That's pretty cool. She's still wanting to just leave Eden alone and watch her. They anticipate that she'll likely get bluer (have more difficulties) when she turns a year old, but since her oxygen levels have been stable since she was about 6 weeks old, that may not happen. If she gets into the lower 80's/upper 70's, they'll want to do surgery. She's currently in the upper 80's/lower 90's, even with some congestion that could either be allergies or somehow related to teething (she's got those two bottom teeth just WAITING to erupt).
I asked about the weaker right ventricle doing the job of the stronger left ventricle and whether or not that would be an issue later on without surgery and she said that there's really no way of telling. Some people have to have surgery to fix it, other people live with it just fine. There's no way to predict which Eden will be.
She offered to space the cardio visits out to every two months if that's more convenient for me, but I said if they want to see her every month, we'll be there every month. So we're still on the monthly schedule.
I made sure to verbalize that if the doctors on either coast want to see us in person, we're willing to do that. It'll be tricky, sure, but we'll do what needs to be done. Plus I'd rather spend a thousand dollars on plane tickets and hotels than $250k on surgery if given the choice.
Eden sits up well now, but she doesn't push herself into a sitting position. When she inevitably falls over, she just rolls onto her stomach and scoots around. She's not crawling or pulling up either, but no one is concerned about that. We haven't put her on the floor much to get the chance to learn that because we're worried about germs and the boys. Within a week of putting her on the floor more, she started sitting up. So I'm hoping in the next month or so she'll start crawling and catch up on her other milestones.
She also hates baby food. She gives us the most adorable disgusted looks when we try to give her something on a spoon and has started pushing it away or turning her head. We discovered that she will eat if she can give it to herself, which is tricky since she's not got the best hand eye coordination yet. But she still manages to get about half the puffs and yogurt melts into her mouth when we put some on the high chair tray. She won't hold her bottle, either.
She really just likes being waited on hand and foot.
Asher is doing better after his issues a couple weeks ago. We still have some problems, but everything we've been doing seems to be helping. At least some. We still have accidents, but they're a lot fewer now. So yay for that.
Elijah has been doing so great. He's really a lot calmer and sweeter and gentler....and then I get a notice that he hit another kid at MDO. And two of his teachers. *sigh* But he's 3. And this isn't the norm anymore. So...half a win? His birthday is in less than two weeks and I asked him what he wanted for his birthday last night. We'd been talking about cupcakes and we'd gotten some at the store for a treat last night. He was already planning on sharing his with Asher so he response to what he wanted for his birthday in two weeks was "Two cupcakes." Well ok then. That's easy enough.
Austin's moved into a new position at work where he's primarily training the customers on how to use the software/tools/etc that they've purchased. That means sometimes they come to him (a Danish customer in a couple of weeks) and sometimes he goes to them (he was in Charlotte for a week a couple weeks ago and goes to Canada next week). This will be an interesting adjustment for us. We're used to him being home every night so adjusting to him being gone on a semi-regular basis will be interesting. The kids are all pretty great about it: we just extend our daily routine and everyone survives. At least while he's in Canada I'll have MDO to send them to....and hopefully I won't be sick. I did tell him that if he gets sent overseas for training, we may go with him, depending on the location. Part of me wants to go ahead and get passports/passcards for the kids just in case. He typically gets about a two week heads up, so they'd be something we'd need to have on hand. Plus its the season of BEST so he's busy most weekends and evenings getting ready for that. That'll all be over with in November. Until next year.
I'm keeping everything going. Laundry, limited house cleaning (we have a housekeeper that comes once a week, paid for by the grandparents, to help with keeping things clean for Eden), meal prep, shopping, appointments, etc. I'm the manager of the house and it's a pretty sweet gig. Long hours, little pay, but still fairly gratifying. Boys running at me shouting "Mommy!" or Eden bouncing and saying "mamamamamamama" when I pick them up from MDO or the church nursery is a pretty nice reward.
So like I said: Not much to report. Things are continuing here like always. Kids are growing and being kids, adults are adulting and planning or trying to plan for the next thing. And the sun rises and sets and the world keeps on spinning.
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