05/17/2011

Alexa and Gavin both love popcorn so Daddy surprised them by bringing home popcorn balls from the grocery store. They were very excited at first, but then they only ate a couple of bites. Apparently popcorn balls aren't as tasty as plain popcorn.

Daddy thought he could take a little snooze on the floor, but the kids have other plans!

It's been so rainy recently! I let the kids draw all over the concrete on our front porch with sidewalk chalk. They are so ready for summer to get here!

Alexa is so artistic. She loves drawing, painting, and coloring.

Gavin was really impressed with the sun that I drew.

Daddy is taking a little study break to cuddle Tysen. He had been studying for his candidacy exam. He just took the exam on Tuesday and he passed! Yay! We are so proud of him!

Tysen is usually only a thumb sucker, but here he was sucking 2 fingers and had another finger up his nose! He's so silly!

05/14/2011 Weekend Fun

I love this picture of Gavin. His cheeks are red because it was hot and he was running around the park picking weeds.

We've been eating supper outside now that it's so warm out. The kids love running around our backyard. I brought out our bubble machine and they chased bubbles for about an hour. They slept really well that night!

We've been checking out several new parks recently. Today we met up with our friends, Kara and Emme.

They had more fun rolling rocks down the slide than they did actually sliding down themselves.

There was all kinds of fun things for the kids to explore. We are definitely going back to this park this summer!

Alexa watched Gavin climb this wall before she tried it. I love it when Gavin teaches her stuff!

Alexa's in the lion's mouth!

Alexa, Emme, and Gavin all swinging

She kept yelling, "I'm flying!"

Tysen hanging out in the shade

05/10/2011

Gavin has speech therapy every Tuesday. I pick him up from daycare at 2:30 to get to our appointment and then afterwards I have a couple of hours to spend one-on-one time with him while Alexa and Tysen are still at daycare. I always utilize that time to focus on speech and apply some new tips that I learned during his therapy. Today after his appointment, it was so beautiful that I took him to the park. I've never taken just Gavin to the park so he was loving all the attention! It was a great place to practice some of the short phrases that we are working on, too. While on the swing, I got him saying, "Up and down! Up and down!"

We also saw some geese nearby so we practiced some animal sounds. He's great at saying, "Honk! Honk!" but the word "geese" comes out sounding like "gee."

We also practiced counting. There were 6 geese near us.

He loves climbing and he is not afraid of anything!

Tuesdays appointment was the eighth visit with our Children's speech therapist. The next two visits our therapist will be repeating the speech evaluation that Gavin did in March. Gavin will be given a score that we can compare to the last result so we can assess how much progress he's made. I know he's making progress. That makes me very happy. But he still has a long ways to go before he's caught up with peers his same age. His therapist is almost certain that Gavin's speech delay is a result of his history of ear problems. Gavin had almost constant ear infections until he was 14 months old and then he had surgery to have drainage tubes placed. Because he wasn't hearing during such a critical developmental period, it's not surprising that he's so delayed. It's because of these struggles with Gavin that I am so concerned about Tysen's hearing. We are seeing firsthand how hearing loss can negatively affect a child's development.

05/09/2011 Tysen Update

In my last update about Tysen's ear problems, we were referred to an ENT after he failed another hearing test. I took Tysen to see Dr. G two weeks ago. At the ENT's office, they did another test to see how the ear drum was functioning. This test was called a tympanogram and a small probe was inserted into his ear canals and it used air pressure to measure how the membrane vibrated. Once again, his left ear drum wasn't functioning properly. His right ear drum wasn't as good as they like to see, but they considered it normal. The findings were suspicious of fluid behind the ear drums. Upon visual inspection of his ears, Dr. G noted that the ear drum on the left side was slightly red. He decided to prescribe a 10 day course of antibiotics. Then he wanted to see us back once the antibiotics were finished to see if there was any improvement.

Today I took Tysen back for his second appointment with the ENT. They repeated the tympanogram, and unfortunately his results were even worse than the last time. Now both ear drums are not functioning, which means that Tysen is not hearing. I was so very disappointed. Dr. G wants to wait another 4 weeks to give Tysen a little bit more time to grow, but then he wants to place tubes in both of his ears to help that fluid drain. The surgery will be done at Children's Hospital and while he is still under anesthesia, they will do some more invasive hearing tests to try and determine if his hearing loss is due to the fluid or due to nerve damage.

05/07/2011

Tysen is starting to hold his own bottle.

Gavin loves to wear sunglasses, even in the house. And apparently he doesn't even care if they are pink and flower-shaped!

Last weekend when I was back in Iowa, I went garage saling with my mom. She bought Alexa this adorable butterfly costume. Alexa loves it so much! She's been wearing it for 2 days now.

The wings are so cute!

Emme came over to our house tonight. Alexa and Gavin love playing with her.

Group Hug!!!