The First Seventy Five Days!

I figure that, with all of this media hype about the first hundred days of the Obama presidency, that Hallie's accomplishments over this past four month period require some touting, too. So I will begin with the major milestone: 75 vomit free days so far this year. And lately we've been averaging only one day a week that doesn't go as well as expected. For us, and for Hallie in particular, that's huge. And, on top of this, we've dropped down her dose of reglan considerably (from about 8 ml a day to 2 ml a day) and halved her dose of axid. We're not seeing any increased reflux, even through a couple of late winter colds and the sudden onset of really awful spring allergies.

To what do we attribute this sudden, and happy, turn of events? What we think is going on is that Hallie's food sensitivities and allergies have finally begun to abate. We haven't done a thorough scientific study of this (they were awfully hard to assess scientifically to begin with since they are purely GI events and are not histamine mediated). But we do know that Hallie recently has had some food that is technically unsafe for her and that, in the old days, would have provoked huge amounts of spewing and that, this time around, she seems to be okay. These foods include a rather yummy flourless chocolate cake from Whole Foods that will be our dessert of choice at Hallie's upcoming third birthday in a mere six weeks if she keeps this up! We're not ready to put her on cow's milk or eggs or anything but we're no longer quite as concerned if she gets into something unsafe or requests a bite of some heretofore forbidden fruit or decides to steal something like ricotta cheese ravioli off of Jake's plate, as she did during a recent visit:

 

Hallie has taken a strong liking to spaghetti sauce and even managed to eat a whole ten rotini in sauce at feeding therapy this past week. So, while we do know that tomatoes are technically a fruit, we nonetheless are counting them as a veggie and can happily say that Hallie has her first consistently-eaten vegetable (other than potatoes). We're still trying to wear down her defenses against carrots and green beans, but we'll take what we can get! Our sense is that it's going to take a very long time for Hallie to trust food generally and that we are still going to have to go quite slowly in our efforts to introduce her to stuff. But as of this month, she has eaten and likes the following foods: apples, pears, prunes, plums, goat milk and cheese, french fries, chicken hot dogs, bacon, fish sticks, potato chips, oreo cookie middles, pasta with sauce, and watermelon. That's about double what she was eating as of December and we're hopeful that we can get to 20 foods by the end of the year.

Along with her eating milestones, Hallie is also developing well in other ways. Her speech is getting much clearer and robust. She now regularly says the following:

-When playing with her animals or pretending to be them: "A (fill in the animal) says (fill in the sound)"
-When building with her blocks: "I build!" "How tall" and, my favorite, "it felled!" (this exclaimed upon knocking down whatever tower she was constructing).
-"I thank you!" whenever I give her something she has requested.
-"Watch Elmo's World Wild Animals" when she wants me to put on one of her favorite DVDs.
-"I play outside" when she wants to go to the playground and "bye-bye playground" when she leaves the park (she uses the ---'bye-bye (fill in the blank)' construction a lot when she is transitioning from an activity.

Additionally, Hallie has a ton of words and more and more emerge every day. She consistently uses plurals and gerunds (-ing) endings now and her pronoun usage is pretty good. She seems to understand past tense endings (hence the "it felled" construction which, while technically erroneous, demonstrates an understanding of how the crazy English language works). And, most importantly, her speech sounds pretty darned spontaneous these days and now includes quite a bit of impromptu singing.

OK--Lea is waking up. I will post this now and try to do another update later.

Smiling Lea

Here's a picture of our favorite three month old. She LOVES sitting up!

 

Tummy Time!

 

 

Lea is getting stronger and stronger each day and her head control is really getting quite remarkable. I'm not sure if it's quite time yet, but I'm tempted to try out our Ergo baby carrier pretty soon. I'd venture to say that Lea weighs around 11.5 pounds at this point and is quite sturdy. The front carriers are not all that comfortable and I really look forward to carrying the kiddo on my hip. Any Ergo users out there, please weigh in (and please note that we do not have the infant insert and are not particularly interested in investing in one since we have inherited lots of other infant carriers).

And, in case you don't think there's a family resemblance between the girls, behold this shot taken in the ball pit:

 

Lea has also been playing with toys a lot more and has found the best toy of all--her hands. I do think she may end up being a thumb sucker (which would come in handy, so to speak, in the car seat when she loses her binky):

 

On tap for this weekend, or maybe during a moment when Nadia can watch both of the kids: removing all of the 0-3 sleepers. Lea has blown right through these and is onto 3-6 month sized clothing. I suspect that we'll have a whole lot of extra size 1 diapers to give away in the not-too-distant future!

Meanwhile, Hallie's love for Lea deepens each day. Hallie loves saying hi to Baby Lea just as much as she loves saying hi to Barney and Elmo and is particularly enamored of returning Lea's "blinky" and bottle to her. And she adores cuddling with and hugging her little sister:

 

 

 

 

Hallie and Eliza Grace's Ring Around the Rosey

Yesterday, we had a very fun playdate with Eliza, her mom, Anne, and her grandmother, Bessie. We were too lame to remember to bring our camera (imagine that!) but Anne took some great pictures and video footage of our girls, who demonstrated that they are very much into joint attention play and not parallel play.



This playdate came on the heels of another fun day spent at Jake and Gina's (pictures to follow), which immediately followed our impromptu belated celebration of cousin Hannah's sixth birthday. The week also included a grueling 2.5 hour assessment of Hallie for preschool services, a fun visit by my best friend from college, Steve, and his charming daughter, Nina and a meeting with the developmental pediatrician at CHOP who, for now, cleared Hallie from a diagnosis that places her on the autistic spectrum (though she warned that we need to follow Hallie and might reassess this later on; meanwhile, she's just registering as a kiddo with an expressive language disorder that hampers her pragmatic use of speech who has raging sensory issues). I will blog about these events later on but I just wanted to provide yet another series of excuses about why I am such a lame blogger right now!

Not only am I a lame blogger, but we have also neglected to form a real team for this year's March for Babies. So, at the eleventh hour, I'm forming a team for the sole sake of trying to raise some much needed funding for the March of Dimes. Click here if you'd like to contribute in honor of Hallie and Lea and in memory of Olivia Skye. And check back later this week for a longer update that will hopefully include an even greater VFQ (vomit free quotient), which now stands at 65 days and counting for 2009.

Life with The Girls: A Pictorial Retrospective of the Last 10 Days

There's nothing quite so lovely as seeing the girls loll about on the bed on a Saturday morning of what has turned out to be a relatively lazy weekend. For once we've stayed at home, which has provided me with some time to catch up on things like filing taxes and doing laundry (well, sort of, anyway; anybody ever notice that two kids produce far more than double the amount of laundry of one, not to mention an exponentially increased number of diapers?). It also gave me a bit of time to upload some of my pictures from the various cameras that we use and post them in draft form on blogger. So, in no real order, here's what's been going on at our house lately.

Ever since Sharon returned back to work three weeks ago, Hallie's been utterly fascinated by Sharon's motorcycle helmet. Sharon doesn't have a real cycle (thank heavens!) but a Honda Metro moped, which is a very convenient and inexpensive way of getting back and forth between our house and her office, which is about ten or so blocks away. Hallie loves to sit on the moped and eagerly awaits the return of mommy each night from the office (she hears her pull up, runs to the door, and shouts out: "Hi Mommy, Hi!"). She also loves the helmet and insists on wearing it. It's pretty heavy but Hallie has a strong neck (and a stubborn streak to boot; in Hebrew, the words "kshei oref" mean 'of strong neck' and were used by God as a fairly pejorative way of referencing those pesky Israelites who wandered through the desert during the 40 years following the Exodus from Egypt. Hallie is already quite adept at following in these tribal ancestral footsteps). Anyway, Hallie loves wearing the helmet around the house. Sadly, the only picture I could get was a bit on the blurry side, but you can see how much she is enjoying herself here:

 

All that helmet wearing is going to come in handy for when Hallie really masters trike riding. She's still a bit hesitant about riding the trike that Mark, Vanessa, and Karina gave her for her second birthday, but she had no problem pedaling away on this somewhat smaller model that she borrowed in the playground a couple of weeks ago:

 

 

And, speaking of enjoying herself, Hallie had a fabulous time hanging out with Jake and his mommy, Gina, last weekend. Gina made sure that there was lots of fun stuff to do, like decorating Easter eggs:

 

Hallie also had fun prancing about in Jake's easter bonnet:

 

When she wasn't excavating all of the toy bins (in other words, trashing the house; thank you, Gina, for being so tolerant of her curiosity!), Hallie was horsing around with Jake. Any time he was off in another room, Hallie would come looking for him, shouting, "Where's Jakey? Where'd he go?" and then, when she found him, would exclaim, "There he is!" The kids had a fabulous time playing together:

 

 

 

Hallie was also a very fine dinner companion for Jake. Or, more to the point, Jake was a total gentleman who sat beside Hallie the entire time and even put her favorite programs on for her (tolerating Sesame Street and Barney when he would have much preferred to have been watching the Disney Channel). Hallie not only ate her usual fare (hot dogs and fries) for dinner but also tried, and loved, the spaghetti we had ordered for her. She did a great job of twirling it onto her fork and actually getting some of it into her mouth. This love of spaghetti (mostly the sauce) has persisted and spaghetti eating is now an emergent skill that she has. Here she is at home enjoying some italian fare:

 

And here's a lovely picture of Gina, Jake, and Baby Lea:

 

We can't wait to hang out again with Gina and Jake next weekend!

Last Sunday, we not only attended the Regatta on the Schuylkill River, in which the girls' oldest cousin, Sarah, who is a freshman crew champion, participated but also had a lovely dinner at Ethan and Cole's granparents' home. Here Hallie, Ethan, and Karina are enjoying some quality time in a Radio Flyer wagon being furiously pulled by yours' truly:

 

Needless to say, everyone was plum tuckered out on Monday!

The rest of the week was fairly quiet (unless you count about a dozen or so assessments and therapy appointments), and, like I said at the outset, we really did enjoy recovering at home this weekend. But this did not mean we were housebound: we did manage to do a Target run that has resulted in the further progression of our living room into a sensory gym. While out shopping for various and sundry birthday presents for other people in our lives, we acquired an inflatable ball pit that the girls absolutely adore. It did take a while to blow up (even using a very noisy air compressor; we are grateful that Hallie demonstrates little in the way of auditory sensitivity) but the wait was well worthwhile:

 

Hallie's not the only one who got in on the fun:

 

 

And apparently the ball pit is useful not only as a place of frolicking, but also napping. Sharon turned her back for a minute and this is what she saw when next she glanced over at Lea:

 

Speaking of Lea, our little one is not only getting bigger by the day (and has now completely outgrown her newborn duds and some of those sized for 0-3 months) but she's also doing more stuff. She's been playing a lot more in her little gym:

 

 

And on April 8th, Lea emitted her first real squeal, much to our delight and amazement. Hallie never squealed (or cried, either; this is a direct byproduct of her vocal cord paralysis and swollen upper airway). So we were thrilled to hear little Lea's voice get so big with glee.

Lea also wore her first jeans a couple of weeks ago and looked quite fetching in them:

 

And, all in all, she is quite a beautiful little 10 week old (if I may say so myself):

 

She's quite the champion:

 

And so is her funky older sister:

 

(Speaking of which: we're now up to 60 vomit free days and Hallie had her first taste of, and seemed to enjoy, some pork breakfast sausage this morning. It would go quite nicely with the bagel she not only gnawed on but even ate a small bite out of yesterday).