Ears, Take 1

Cole had his surgery today.  It did not go well.  Well, I take that back, it did not go as hoped.  I should have guessed today was not going to be a great day.  Shelby was up 7 or 8 times between 10:30 and 4 this morning.  I finally managed to get 2 1/2 hours of sleep in a row, at the expense of my alarm clock which apparently shut itself off this morning.  Pat called wanting to know if I was up 15 minutes before we needed to be on the road.  We were not off to a great start.  We managed to get there on time, miraculously.

The surgery process itself was fine.  Cole was a trooper.  They said he hopped up on the bed and chatted away until he was out.  They came to get us 20 minutes later.  I knew that wasn't a good sign.  Turns out the drainage in his ear isn't drainage.  He has a cyst which may be harder to remove.  They took his adenoids out, then went to suction the drainage, but kept getting chunks, instead of liquid.  So what does that mean?  He has to have a CT scan to get a look at the ear bones.  The cyst can erode the bones of the ear, so they need to check that they are ok or if they need to rebuild them.  It will also give them an idea of the placement of the cyst.  The reason they don't do the CT scan first is that drainage and cysts look the same, so they don't know what they are dealing with until they go in.  Removing it can be as simple as lifting the ear drum and scraping it out or as complicated as having to drill in the bone behind the ear to get at it.  The CT scan should give them a better idea of what they are looking at.  I'm obviously hopeful for the first option, but not terribly optimistic.  He has his scan on Friday.  I'm not sure what we are looking at for surgery #2 yet.

Coming out of surgery was no picnic.  He did well, but he was hurting and didn't know what to make of it all.  As I write this he is back to his normal self, so he bounced back quickly.  I gently broke it to him tonight that he would have to go back again, but this time they wouldn't be messing with his throat, just his ear.  He takes it all in stride like he usually does.

As far as his hearing goes, if the bones are not eroded, he should regain perfect hearing.  If they have to rebuild bones, he can come away with good hearing, but it will never be perfect.  I guess I'm just glad it's not life threatening and he still has perfect hearing in his right ear in which to ignore me with. :)

8 months!

 My baby girl turned 8 months last week.  I cannot believe how fast she is going.  Facebook lost my album of her and so I went back and added her pics since she was born.  I can't believe how much she has changed!

Without further ado... her 8 month pics:

So big!

 Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a picture of an 8 month old?!?

Yummm!  Camera!

We did manage to get a fairly decent shot.

She is semi-mobile and gets a little more ambitious every day.  The trick she learned this morning...

She did that all on her own.  She's started pulling her knees up underneath her too.  I was hoping our tree would be safe this year, but I have a feeling she won't wait until after Christmas to start moving.  She finally started rolling all the way over this weekend.  She'd go over but wouldn't pull her arm out.  Now she just rolls and rolls and rolls.  She's never in the place I leave her.  Guess we need to start using baby gates again!

Hearing Part II

Cole met with another audiologist and the Otolaryngologist (aka, ENT, but that word makes me look smart right? Especially when google doesn't even recognize the word) today.  His hearing was not as bad as last time he was tested, but still not where it should be.  This points to the blockage in his ear being caused by lack of drainage.  The ENT also pulled out a dime sized portion of what looked like crusted boogers out of his ear.  This also points to excessive drainage.  So what does this mean?  Cole will have surgery in a couple of weeks to put a tube in his ear.  Since he is 6 and does not have a history of ear infections it also means that something is causing the blockage and the ENT seems to think that his adenoids are the culprit.  I don't disagree.  He snores and his tonsils are enlarged which typically means the adenoids are as well.  The fantastic news is that his nerves are not damaged so once we get the drainage out of the way, his hearing should fully return!  The only complication is that if the blockage is caused by skin, it's a much more invasive surgery, but all the signs point to drainage and not a skin blockage.  I am praying that is true.

In other news, Shelby is semi-mobile.  She's not crawling, but she is finally rolling.  I don't think crawling will be far behind.  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  Both boys were late with everything, and while she certainly isn't early, it's nice knowing where she is.

6 year old worries

Cole is a worrier.  I'm sure I've blogged about this before, but he hasn't grown out of it like I had hoped.  This week is the book fair at school.  They did something new this year called Reach for the Stars.  Each child was supposed to read 20 minutes each night for about 2 weeks.  Each night they filled in a star to show that they had read that day.  They got sponsors and half the money donated went to the school for new library/classroom books.  The other half the kids got to keep in the form of a voucher for the book fair.  If kids did the reading but didn't have sponsors, they still got a $5 voucher.  So each kid that did the reading got at least one book from the book fair.  I thought it was kind of a neat idea.  My boys had some sponsors (thank you grandmas and grandpas and aunts!)  so they had a bit of money to spend.  They had all sorts of neat books and Cole picks out Earthquakes and Tsunamis among other less worrisome titles.  It was a factual book, but every page brought a new round of questions along with "can that happen here?"  Ugh!  I tried to convince him to look for another book, but nope, he wanted THAT one.  I tried reassuring him that we are not going to have earthquakes and tsunamis here, but it couldn't wipe that worried look off his face.  He is the kid that you make sure you don't watch or discuss news around.  I'm still hoping he grows out of it.  Enough to not be afraid, but not enough that he stops caring.

Ears

I've got this kid.  He's a good kid; well-behaved, even-tempered, mild-mannered.  He's the one who's had surgery, broken a leg, broken a shoulder, and now has significant hearing loss in his left ear.  My heart breaks for him.  Thankfully, it appears the hearing loss is treatable, but it's just one more thing he has to go through.  He's just that kid that if something bad is going to happen, it's going to happen to him.

At his normal check up in June, he did not do well on his hearing test, but whether it was from too many distractions or actual hearing loss, we weren't sure.  The free audiology testing is only done during the school year, so I figured we'd wait until school started.  Then cross country started so I figured I'd just wait until I was done coaching to take him in.  At about the time that happened, I got a call from the school nurse saying he didn't pass his hearing test.  So in we went.  The audiologist said his hearing loss is equivalent to wearing an ear plug and holding your hand over that ear.  The funny thing, no one noticed.  He never said anything.  His teacher didn't notice.  I didn't notice.  Talk about making you feel like a bad parent.  How do you not notice your kid is half deaf?!?  We see an ENT at the end of this month.  Pray it's an easy fix and he gets to spend the rest of his years as "normal."

Dress Up Day

aka, Halloween.

Last year I decided to attempt to make the kids costumes.  I had always bought them before, but the kids were little and didn't care what they were, so I could wait until the last minute and buy them on clearance and choose whatever was left.  Last year I found instructions for making a puffin costume that looked easy enough and Cole was very compliant.  Tate eventually settled on a shark which was easy enough to make also.

This year Cole came home from school in early September informing me that he wanted to be the black ninja because his name was also Cole.  For those of you who aren't parents of elementary aged boys, the black ninja named Cole is from Lego Ninjago.  Tate thought that he could be the red ninja.  Turns out, ninja costumes are super easy.  Red shirt, red pants, red scarf, red stocking had with a slit cut in it, Voila!  Cole even made nunchuks out of twine string and milking inflations.  Tate used the pirate sword he got from the children's museum.  Super easy!

Having a girl is different.  When Cole was a baby, we didn't do Halloween.  Tate was a lion only because we had to bring him along anyway.  That was not going to be good enough for my baby girl.  She needed to be extra cute!  I found an idea for a candy corn costume on pintrest.  It looked simple enough.  The only problem, I couldn't find the right colored material, so I had to dye it. This fabric didn't dye particularly well, but good enough.  Her costume took a lot more time and money than the boys, but she was awfully stinking cute!

2 ninjas and a candy corn

The sweetest candy corn ever!

Sentimental Value

I had a garage sale last weekend.  Of course, that meant going through tons of baby clothes and deciding what to sell and what to keep.  It's not an easy task.  One of the things I came across was a pair of socks.  I set them aside and when Cole came home from school, he asked why I wasn't selling this particular pair of socks.  I told him these socks had sentimental value.  He wanted to know why.  These are the socks I'm talking about:

This was Cole the day of his surgery to close his PDA (a small duct above the heart that normally closes after birth, technically it wasn't surgery, but they had to knock him out and do procedures and stuff).  If you met Cole his first year of life, you wouldn't have noticed anything wrong with him, but he was small, he slept a lot, and his feet were always cold.  I just chalked the latter up to a family trait.  He always had socks on.  He was the first one in that morning for his procedure, then he had to remain completely flat for 6 hours following, to make sure the site where they went in closed properly.  We lost one of his socks at some point and while I was searching for it, Pat told me to touch his sockless foot.  It was warm.  For the first time in 14 months our baby's feet were warm!

I gave Cole the shortened version of that story and about teared up holding those socks.  We had wondered whether this procedure was really necessary since he never seemed to have any ill effects of that duct, but we did what the doctors recommended.  I guess warm feet were our sign that this was the right decision.

On a side note, one of the socks has gone missing again...