Silly Hallie!

Hallie is a very silly toddler. Some of her favorite games are incredibly silly. Months ago, you might recall, Sharon began to play "where's Grover" with Hallie. This involves making lots of "dah-dah-dah-dah" and "zhip" noises, flying Grover around the room and over Hallie's head and eventually stuffing Grover into Hallie's shirt or pants and making her remove him. She still thinks this is great, but she's branched out a bit:




Another thing that Hallie really enjoys is being smushed, preferably by Karina. This works out well because Karina, as the daughter of a former Rugby player (who gave this up after getting her PhD for a career as a consultant), Karina's got tackle holds in her genes. So she loves to run up to kids and hug them...and squeeze them...and knock them down.



Hallie adores this (though we make sure that Hallie's belly is not full when this happens because I think neither of the kids, nor their horrified parents, would enjoy any of the outcomes of this scenario terribly much).

So, after deeming enough Rugby to be enough, we had Karina modify the game a bit:




Suffice it to say that being dragged along the floor by Karina was nearly as much fun as being smushed by Karina.

Hallie's other latest greatest form of silliness involves climbing up on the table next to the couch and diving back onto the couch when we tell her to get off the table. An alternate form of this game involves climbing into the changing table portionof the pack and play located on the other side of the couch and trying to dive off of that one (to parts unknown). Now, technically, this brings her into compliance with the command "get off the table" or "no climbing into the changing table" or what have you. So we have to concede this one. But it doesn't comply with, or facilitate, our goal of keeping Hallie's head in one piece, remaining out of the CHOP ER and silly, frivolous stuff like that. So, over the past two days Sharon and I have each, independently, had to remove Hallie from the couch, stand her up in the living room and give her a talking to that went something like "You are not to climb on the table/changing table because it is dangerous and you will hurt yourself and so you are now officially banned from doing so". Needless to say, and as we both admitted readily to one another, the talking to made us feel better--like we were doing something proactive and being good parents and removing her from a situation that was dangerous, yada yada yada. It appears to have a less than effective impact on Hallie, who continues to climb. So, we need to start thinking about discipline, and hoping that the crocodile tears that this induces will not result in yet more vomiting.

Speaking of crocodile tears, along with ramped up silliness, we've also had ramped up terrible-two-tantrumness lately. Hallie loves to put my shoes on her hands and feet---which is okay with me---but lately she's also taken to trying to pull whatever remains of the fleecy inners of my clogs out of the footbed and EAT it. (Why does she eat fuzz and fluff and cardboard and not food is beyond me). This is not OK. My feet are none too sweet smelling and I cannot imagine that my clogs are anything but repositories for stinky stinky germs and she will not, under my watch, eat my shoes. I feel ridiculous even typing this. So I took them away. And she bawled. It was quite silly, really, and I did not give in, but I did suppress my desire to laugh at her. Eventually, with redirection she forgot (temporarily) about how good my shoe fluff tasted. Eeeeewwww.

Meet our New Speech Therapist

...none other than 2 year old Karina, our next door neighbor.

Happily, she has agreed (I have it in chalk!) to a mere 10 dollars an hour.

Seriously, though, she is the one person (toddler) who can get Hallie imitating. Her trick? Imitating Hallie. She does a very nice job of it and only occasionally gets frustrated by the antics of her slightly younger client. See for yourselves:



Actually, Hallie has been having a bit of speech explosion. She has been babbling and for once it sounds like really baby babbles. And while she still loses words (doggie is replaced by its corresponding sign, as has her 'read it' command and 'cookie' is nowhere to be found), she's also been gaining new ones. Her latest is 'wah-dah' for water and I am reinforcing it by turning on the water and letting her wash her hands in it. She loves it, but I do need to get her a stepstool since my back is killing me from lifting our 25 and half pounder.

More later on our fun visit with the family for the joyous occasion of Aunt Laura's 40th birthday.

Happy Birthday, Karina!

This weekend, Karina celebrated her second birthday. Time really does fly around here. We can still remember visiting Vanessa (with some yummy Capogiro gelato) right after Karina was born. I was so afraid to hold her--Karina was less than a day old and I'd never held a baby so small. Little did we know that in three short months, Hallie and Olivia would redefine "small" for us in ways unimaginable at the time.

Anyway, Karina had a stellar birthday weekend. On Friday night, the whole commune went out to Chuck-e-Cheese for dinner and entertainment. The bigger kids (Ethan and Karina are both two, so they get to be called big kids now) had a blast, Hallie had a pretty good time, but was a bit overwhelmed---she enjoyed going on the merry go round and riding in the Barney car and the like and kept signing 'more' for us to deposit another token, but refused to smile the whole time. We're going to try to get her out more so that we begin to redress this social fear to whatever extent we can.





Here's a great picture of Karina with her daddy, Mark, who is very intensely at play:


Hallie got to play with Karina on Saturday night, too, and was thrilled at the prospect. In addition to the Chuck-e-Cheese adventure, the girls had an impromptu playdate on Friday afternoon as well---they had not seen each other all week at that point. Basically, the more Hallie sees Karina, the more she wants to see Karina. I hear the feeling is quite mutual and that Karina spends considerable time at home asking to see Hallie. Hallie doesn't use words to ask for Karina, but she goes over to the party wall that we share and bangs it, or goes to the door and rattles it and begins to whine. It's pretty clear what she wants. And every time I take her down the block on foot or in her little car, she walks up the steps to Karina's house and begs to be let in. Very cute.

Sunday was Karina's big party day. This is the sort of smile that entering Karina's house elicits from Hallie:



All the kids had fun playing and being read to by various adult guests:





And Hallie had a great time devising alternative uses for chopsticks (the rest of us used them for very yummy dim sum):


And while Hallie's stay at the party was cut a bit short by an altercation with blue jello (her difficulty with this texture really makes me think that a big part of her eating problem is sensory in nature), she did get to see Karina for dinner again on Sunday and Monday nights. Hallie was in seventh heaven and we have some great pictures/video footage of Hallie having an extensive conversation with Karina last night. Generally speaking, Hallie is happier to talk to Karina than to anyone else in the world and we are beginning to think that we should put Karina on the payroll as our private speech therapist. Karina may or may not want this job, though. While she adores Hallie, Hallie did boink Karina on the head pretty hard last night while leaning in to kiss her best friend (and I also think Karina may be a bit creeped out by Hallie's slobbery open mouth kisses, to boot!). This had Karina beating a hasty retreat when Hallie leaned in again a few minutes later. Nothing like a good Hallie boink (the kid really has a hard head!) to make you summon all possible self-protective measures against future head boinking.

I'll try to get around to uploading the video later on, since it really was a nice exchange (and hopefully we will be able to hear all of Hallie's very soft chattering throughout the conversation). But meanwhile, I just wanted to close by saying that Hallie has definitely been speaking more the past couple of days. This may or may not be related to the new fish oil dose (10 ml), and the upsurge in vomiting also may or may not be somewhat related to this increase. But she has been speaking more and last night kept repeating "wada" (water) and doing the sign for "water" over and over again. Let's see if we still hear it today. "Mama" is being used very sparingly and "kitty" "whas dat?" and "teddy" seem to still be the most stable words in Hallie's rather thin repertoire. Meanwhile, we got the write-up of her speech eval, complete with a long list of goals that neither of us can imagine Hallie achieving, and certainly not within the next three months. This was pretty shocking and depressing but we're doing what we can to get her into private therapy as quickly as possible and we're reading up on alternative techniques for providing therapy to an apraxic child and these might be helping some, too. We'll take it one day at a time, hope we can make some reasonable progress and pray hard that the words Hallie is saying become second-nature to her and that we hear them all the time.

On the eating front: no progress. Last week was one of the worst refund weeks ever (Sunday was a record bad day for 2008 with 5 separate vomit-cleaning occasions and the average has been twice a day for the rest of the week). We're not really sure what is going on, but it could be the extra calories in Hallie's food, it could be too much in the way of banana and not enough in the way of liquids to move things through her system, but whatever it is, we are officially tired of it and want it to go away so that we can rest a little and not have to refeed our kid five to seven times a day. And in terms of feeding, our new OT will try to work with Hallie on this some. So Friday we have a date with some mashed potatoes and rigatoni. I can only imagine what that's going to be like, but at least I'll have a professional around to keep Hallie distracted while I clean up the mess!

To not end on such a sour (stomach) note, I'll leave you with a cute picture of Hallie's belly. Our girl can now completely undress herself as long as there is no onesie involved, and perhaps even if there is. Isn't her tummy cute?

Photo Thursday

I sort of fibbed last time when I said that we had no new pictures. The issue was that I had forgotten to upload the ones we do have...

So, for your visual pleasure, (and to spare you my verbose prose for a bit), I'll start this post with a long photo retrospective of the past week or so.

First, we decided that Hallie cannot possibly really have a 13 week long cold and that the issue must be something else. Since the quarantine hadn't really (who am I kidding...in the least is more like it) improved the congestion situation, we decided that for the sake of Hallie's development and her mommies' sanity, we'd lift it a bit and allow some interaction with friends and family. If things get better with our new regimen (more on this later), we'll lift the quarantine further. However, we're going to be vigilant about making sure we spray down toys, purell everything in sight, etc etc.

So about ten days ago, we brought Hallie over to see Karina. The kids obviously missed each other desperately and spent the first ten minutes hugging. No exaggeration on this, either. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to capture this session (the camera was over in our house, next door). But we did manage to get one cute shot of Karina doing Hallie's hair:



Hallie also enjoyed playing with Karina's toys, and especially with the excellent music table that Karina got from one of her Hong Kong relatives. Here's DJ Jazzy Hallie mixing it up:



And here's a great shot of Hallie's strong legs and lack of butt. Seriously, this kiddo has no hips and no tushy. Unless she gets a belly somehow, I think we're going to start looking for toddler suspenders for her (I am sure she'll enjoy chewing on them):



Then, last Saturday, despite the vomiting and congestion, Hallie and Mommy went off to the shore (I stayed home to get some stuff done) to visit Grammy, Aunt Laura and the cousins. Hallie loved playing in the pool (her favorite activities are water-related. She loves her floaty device, all wading pool experiences, and lots of splashing. In the bath at night these days, she likes to stand up and then let go and splash hard on her butt and then stick her face in the water and blow bubbles. She does this over and over and it's really cute, even if it is a bit odd. Alas, we haven't yet captured that on video but will try to do so before she gives up this practice for some other antic). Hallie was less sure of what to make of the carousel on the boardwalk at Ocean City:




She eventually settled in for the ride, which (along with the chock-full day, the sun, and all the activities with her cousins) began to put our little one to sleep:

Hallie had a great time as usual hanging out with the family. Here's a picture of Hallie smiling at Hannah, who is doing a very nice supermodel impression:



Hannah always makes Hallie smile!



And here's Hallie with Grammy, Aunt Laura, and the cousins:



Later on, Hallie was taken on a visit to all of the great food emporia on Ocean City's boardwalk and tasted many new things.

Here she's staring adoringly at Mack and Manco's pizza (like Mommy, like Hallie!):



And here she's tucking into a cone of soft ice cream. Yummy!


And here she's having her very first experience with cotton candy, which went quite well. What could be better: it's melt in your mouth and chock full of calories. Now if they could only make it loaded with vitamins and fat, we'd have the perfect food for her. Any budding culinary chemists out there, here's your challenge: come up with a healthy, fattening, avocado flavored spun food that melts in your mouth, and you will have hundreds of micropreemie mommies as your loyal customers!



Then, on Tuesday, Hallie got to spend time (FINALLY!) with her friend Maya (and Maya's lovely parents, Rachel and Dan). Loyal blog readers will remember that Maya and her sister Elana were 25 and a half weekers born at the same hospital as Hallie and Olivia a month earlier. They were the people we always looked for when we were in the hospital (which was pretty much always, and their family was pretty much there constantly too) and we've gotten to know them very well over the past year. Unfortunately, our concerns about Hallie's health have kept the girls apart much more than we would have liked, but we NEEDED to see them on Tuesday since they are leaving for California this weekend. So we bit the bullet, sprayed everything down very carefully and had them over to dinner. Karina and Vanessa (her mom) also joined us, and the three girls had a blast together.

Maya, you were supposed to call!




Kiddle conference around the coffee table:




Karina having a good time petting Maya:


Anyway, the kids had a great time together, the parents had fun, and we will miss Maya, Rachel, and Dan A LOT. We hope they'll be back on this coast soon to visit Rachel's family and that we can make play dates with them here or in NJ (since Rachel's family lives very close to Sharon's, that should be fairly easy to arrange). Maya is such a beautiful baby with such a winning personality and it's going to be fun watching our girls grow into toddlers together.

Very very briefly on the Feeding Clinic at St. Joseph's: we had a good day, even if it was a long one. First, it was nice to know that Hallie has put on weight in spite of the problems with food and vomiting---according to their scale, she was...get ready for this...18 lbs. 4.5 ounces. We don't know if the scale was accurate (it was one of those really old-fashioned ones; you can really tell the difference in funding between CHOP and St. Joe's, which is in a very depressed area of Northern New Jersey). Anyway, even if the scale is off by a bit, Hallie has still put on upwards of 3/4 of a pound in the past week and is now very VERY close to being on the actual chart for weight (in other words, for 13.5 months). She definitely has more leg chub and a few extra chins.

But more importantly, even if they don't have the high tech bells and whistles that they did at CHOP, we found that the Feeding and Swallowing Clinic at St. Joe's was much more thorough and much more sympathetic to what is going on with us and more willing to try to figure out how to solve it. They did a more thorough observation of Hallie's eating (instead of the 1.4 seconds of me shoving the bottle in the baby's mouth before the CHOP doc came back in and said, 'she's got an uncoordinated suck, is aspirating, and probably needs a G-Tube). In fact, the word 'G-Tube' NEVER came up today. Nonetheless, they noticed from Hallie's posture, the way she crawled, etc that she was uncomfortable, that the posture looked a lot like her compensating for reflux that is not really under control, and they raised the question of whether the vomiting and congestion could be related to a milk intolerance that isn't as horrible as some kids' but is still causing her a lot of discomfort. This might make some sense since this all began when Hallie came off of breast milk, which had been diluting her Enfamil AR, and began to drink AR straight and then the very hard to digest Pediasure. First, we're going to try a new regimen with Prilosec that helps her system use it more effectively (moving from the bicarb solution to capsules, the beads of which we will mix with a little applesauce and feed to her an hour before dinner to make sure that her stomach is a lot less full). If that doesn't help, we'll move from Pediasure to Peptamen. And if that doesn't work, we'll see. But it was heartening to hear someone say something other than "live with it" or "tube her." I know that our Ped. has been trying to help (and he got us to St. Joe's to begin with, which is very good), but it's been a very frustrating two-three months and the frustration has pretty much persisted unabated. The very idea of having a reasonable sounding treatment plan and sympathetic people who are trying to really help us is calming. Hopefully some of this will work, because if we can get this under control, we can begin to teach Hallie how to deal with textures, subdue her gag reflex a bit, etc. Without getting the congestion and the pain that she must be feeling under control (not to mention begin to heal some of the damage that is being done to her esophagous), we can't really deal with the behavioral issues. Anyway, I'll post updates on this as we progress; meanwhile, keep your fingers crossed for us!

The Big One

Today Hallie turned one.

She began her celebration with a lovely breakfast of chicken and vegetable stew mixed with butter and pear/pineapple medley (please don't ask...I am sure that, when she's older and she reads this blog she's going to be horrified by the food combos to which we subjected her). She followed this up with a session of practicing "pull to stand" that ended with a quick dive off of the couch. Happily, I caught her on the first bounce. Unhappily, this involved a small amount of crying that resulted from shock, breaking her fall with her arms, and a short skid along the carpet. No one was hurt, but I made a mental note to practice my own dive and rescue techniques so that I'd be a quicker responder to such events which, alas, will probably become ever more frequent in the upcoming days.

This afternoon, Hallie was honored by a visit from Aunt Ellen, who is Hallie's first friend. Ellen is the first nurse that we all got to meet in the Labor and Delivery suite to which Sharon was rushed (careening into walls, doors, and us) a year and a day ago today. Ellen's prediction when she said, "Ladies, we are going to get to know each very well this summer" was totally on target. Anyway, Hallie shares all of her important milestones with Ellen, and today was no exception.

Here's Hallie ripping into her gifts from Ellen. She found the paper intensely exciting and apparently quite flavorful.



Maybe her high fiber diet is the reason we are getting to change so many interesting diapers these days?

Aunt Ellen and Hallie had a very long, very serious birthday talk, to which Hallie responded with many high-pitched "ays" and "ahs."



Then we all went off to More Than Just Ice Cream for lunch. Hallie was very well behaved and crunched away on her Trader Joes veggie sticks and had some bottle while we partook in salads and such, saving lots of room for the purpose of this visit: long ago, back when Hallie weighed considerably less than two pounds, Ellen had promised that she would take Hallie out for chocolate ice cream on her first birthday.

Here's Hallie digging into her very first sundae:



Truth be told, right now we think that Hallie enjoys fruit flavors above everything else, and to our horror, she liked the low fat peach frozen yogurt the best. But she got to sample lots of different flavors--chocolate marshmallow, mint chip, cinnamon bun, and coffee and liked all but the last of the ice creams.

This little exercise of feeding Hallie did, however, involve the use of many spoons. This was not because our girl is a stickler for avoiding double dipping but because she takes very seriously the fact that these spoons are of the "take and toss" variety. She is especially fond of the "toss" bit and this is what the floor looked like after our little adventure:



Needless to say, we tipped well.

Later on today, we had dinner with a subset of the commune. Ethan, unfortunately, was a bit under the weather so he and Josh could not attend, so we got together with Mark, Vanessa, and Karina for a short meal and birthday cake. Karina and Hallie had a blast hanging out with one another.



Karina was very emotional about her best friend turning one. At one point, she reached over and gave Hallie a huge hug and kiss. Hallie was a bit stunned but took the headlock Karina placed on her in stride:



Like Ellen, Karina also gave our girl a birthday talk:



This was followed by a long 'girls only' conversation that we found absolutely hilarious.



Then we brought out the cake, which was dedicated to both Hallie and Olivia:



Hallie helped us blow out the candle:



Then she got down and dirty with the cake, which not only was delicious but has secret moisturizing capacities:



A good time was had by all and Hallie especially enjoyed her post-cake, pre-bedtime bath.

Our Visit with the Teacher of the Year...And Other Crazy Antics of the Week

...Who is also the Aunt of the Year.

Today, Hallie had her first ever non-medically-related crossing of the stateline into New Jersey (back in November when she was in the middle of her food strike we needed to go to Vorhees, NJ to visit a nutritionist). We piled Hallie, her six bags (we're not exagerrating!) and our two selves into the car and headed towards the Shore and Aunt Laura. Aunt Laura's birthday was this week and we wanted to celebrate in style, with all of us in attendance, none of us on oxygen, and most of us eating cake (we're pretty sure that Hallie's ever so yummy dinner of oatmeal, butter, and pureed pears does not qualify as cake). Hallie reasoned that, since Aunt Laura was there for her three times a week at the very least (and during the worst of the roller coaster days, considerably more often than that) and had devised all sorts of celebrations in her honor while she was cooped up in the Intensive Care Nursery at Pennsylvania Hospital (including the fabulous double-your-weight gift bags that contained double mint gum, double chocolate pudding, and a few other dynamic duos; the breathe-right gift bags to celebrate a week off of the vent--you guessed correctly: breathsavers were a prominently featured candy; and eentsy-teentsy, teeny-weeny baby bottles filled with pastel colored m-and-m's to mark Hallie's first bottle), the least Hallie could do is show up at Aunt Laura's birthday dinner. This is especially because Aunt Laura, who is a first grade teacher, just made Teacher of the Year for her school. This doesn't surprise Hallie--she was a first-hand beneficiary of Aunt Laura's considerable pedagogical skills. Way to go, Aunt Laura! We are so proud of her.

Hallie was held a lot by Aunt Laura and her Grammy, but she also got some fun playtime in with her big little cousins Hannah (who is almost-four-going-on-fourteen) and Adam, who just turned two. The three of them had a ton of fun together, sharing toys, squeals, and hugs and kisses. We were really thrilled by how gentle Hannah (who gave Hallie one of her stuffed animals and wanted nothing more than to hold and kiss her little girl cousin) and Adam, who 'played nice' and exhibited his softer side, were with Hallie:

This wasn't Hallie's first play-date of the week. She spent a considerable amount of it in the presence of her two best buddies, Karina and Ethan, who are members of what is quickly becoming known as the "Queen Street Commune." Her mommies have dinner with Karina's and Ethan's parents about three times a week, including the night of the evil ice storm (as the past Friday night has become known in these here parts). When we were over on Friday, Karina's mommy (Vanessa) was holding Hallie and all of us were a bit afraid when Karina (who is highly mobile) made a bee-line for them. It wouldn't be out of place for a one year old to be a bit jealous of a baby snuggled up in mommy's lap. But not Karina: Karina headed over to Hallie, put her arm around her, and gave her a kiss. It was very sweet to watch but happened way too quickly for any of us to capture the moment on virtual film.

Hallie also shared more than a few sweet moments with Maya on Wednesday of this past week. Sharon brought Hallie over to play at Maya's house. At first the kids were more interested in one another's toys than they were in each other, but as the hours unfolded, they became increasingly aware of one another's presence and inched towards one another on the floor. Finally, they made contact and grabbed hold of each other's hands and looked up at their moms for approval:

The moms (Sharon and Rachel) loved every minute of it. Once the warm weather is here to stay (clearly not this week!) we're going to have another play date at the park. Hallie told Maya all about the fun swings and now Maya can't wait to try it out too.

And if that was not all, Hallie also had a visit from Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bob this week. Uncle Bob had never met Hallie and had merely heard tell of the many wonders of his wife's primary: Hallie was Ellen's first Labor and Delivery baby, first 23 Weeker, and probably several other firsts. Her mommies were perhaps not her first absolutely neurotic, anxiety ridden parents, but most likely the first to have moved into the ICN: we literally had our own pillows and chenille throws in the hospital with us and on more than one occasion, Ellen threatened to have us sent home. Anyway, we adore Ellen and love having her over at every opportunity. This time we got to share the joy of Hallie with Bob, too. Alas, Hallie was a bit over-tired on Wednesday (she is teething, had been out of the house since before 10 that morning, and spent a whole bunch of time melting down in a parking lot that was gridlocked not long before the appointed dinner hour). So she wasn't her usual flirty self, but hopefully Uncle Bob will be back to visit again when Hallie is more well rested.

Hallie is making great strides towards fulfilling this goal of sleep induced bliss; not only does she spend each and every night in her own crib, but she also takes lovely languid naps with Sharon (AKA Sleeping Mommy) in between. And so I leave you with one inspirational last image for the day:
Nighty Night, All!