July 11, 2010

We had a great vacation. Charlotte saw both sets of grandparents and met many of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins. It's so nice to finally feel free to take her places without fearing every cough/sneeze and without pushing hand sanitizer on everyone within arms reach of Charlotte.

We are happy to have arrived home safely and are getting back into our routine. Here are a few pictures from the week:

We visited Oxbow Park with my parents, Aunt Mary, cousin Karen, and Karen's 3 kids. The weather was perfect (some might say it was hot) and the day was lots of fun.

It was impossible to get a picture with all 4 kids looking at the camera, but this was pretty close.

Children of the Corn? No, just Charlotte's first time seeing a corn stalk!

Charlotte isn't quite sure what to think of grass, especially damp grass. Though she is quite skilled at not touching the grass with any of her limbs - look at that balance!

"He loves me, he loves me not..."

She wants to crawl, and is so close! Good thing she's not going anywhere too fast because our apartment is not yet baby proofed. We're slowly but surely packing up all of our books and bookshelves so that she won't pull them down on top of herself when she does become mobile.

Here's a picture of Pat going against doctor's orders. :) Charlotte loves to stand and she's pretty good at holding herself up against the couch. However, the developmental doctor, Dr. Bear, strongly advised us to not hold her up with her weight on her legs. Her philosophy is that babies have so many stages to go through (sitting, crawling, then pulling themselves up, then walking) and we don't want to encourage her to skip them. We follow the rules most of the time, but sometimes it's just fun to see her stand up...and she loves it!

A day late, but here is Charlotte's 11 month photo! What a great 11 months it has been - and almost one year! We feel so blessed to have such a fun, happy little baby. Sure she has a feeding tube, but she is so easy to take care of. She's just a happy girl...except for an hour or so before bed time during which she experiences the "unhappy hour" (thanks to the Hoenisch's for that term, I like it). Oh, and she's getting her first tooth! We can feel it when she bites our finger, and just this morning we could see where the skin is starting to break. I was beginning to worry she might be limited to jell-o forever!

We have an appointment with Radiology at CHW to have Charlotte's G tube converted to a GJ tube on July 29. At first we wanted to put it off until September and hope she would start keeping her food down, but it's just not likely and we hope getting this done sooner rather than later will make her life more pleasant and make her want to eat by mouth. In addition to concern about her weight gain, the GI doc's decision to move forward with the GJ tube was precipitated by the speech therapist putting a bit of applesauce on Charlotte's lip. Charlotte immediately threw up without even touching the applesauce with her tongue or the inside of her mouth. Who would want to eat when their gag reflex is that strong? Definitely not Charlotte.