This Time Last Year ...

So I had this grand idea for a 'looking back' post to celebrate the one year anniversary of this blog. On August 11th, today, I'd planned to look back at my very first post and reminice about what we were going through. So I just looked back at that first post, (There were actually 2 that day!) but silly me, I missed the boat. Apparently, I started the blog on August 8th. Oh well.

We've still come a long way since this time last year. Click on the link if you want to re-read those first few posts. http://http//theleghorns.blogspot.com/2008/08/waiting-to-come-home.html We were sharing with the our friends and family what was going on with our new addition. She was being diagnosed with meningitis. She was on IV antibiotics and had heart, respitory and blood-oxygen monitors attached to her little body. We only saw her a few hours a day, but were accepting our new life and, most of the time, felt very grateful for the excellent care she was getting. I say most of the time because there were a few ... okay, maybe more than a few ... times that I didn't believe her doctors or was frustrated that they couldn't figure out exactly what was going on or tell me when she would come.

On August 11th of last year, we were excited because it was the day she had her last dose of IV antibiotics and started taking amoxicillin to guard against a UTI. She is still on amoxicillin so I guess not everything changes. It's kind amazing that the child who was almost deathly ill as a newborn hasn't been sick since. I believe it has a lot to do with the fact that she takes that amoxicillin everyday. We will go see her urologist in September. Our ideal outcome is that he tells us that her reflux has corrected itself and that she can stop the amoxicillin. There is only about a 20% chance that will happen, but Emma has fallen into the minority in many situations, although usually those minority categories are those with negative outcomes. For example, there is a 10% change with every shunt surgery whether an implation or revision that the device will malfunction at some point. That means that 90% of the time, everything is A-OK! Now I do know that you all can do the math, but I just want to point out that the odds that a shunt will work properly and not require a revision are supposedly very good. Our little Emma, however, fell into that tiny little 10% not once, but twice! In 3 1/2 months! So maybe it's not too crazy to hope that she will fall in the 20% of children who's reflux is gone by 1 year. (Although if I'm completely honest, I wouldn't mind holding off a few more illnesses with the daily dose of amoxicillin!)

Okay, I've gotten a little off topic. Eventhough we're still shooting the pink stuff into her mouth with a little oral syringe once a day a year later, not much else is the same. Oh yeah, she still has hydrocephalus, but as I've said, for now, that's no match for her!

Sunday morning on the deck in pj's ... oh and a bow, of course.

So what is my little Lovebug up to these days? One year after I started blogging about her? Well, what is she not up to? Oh, well, she's not walking or standing independantly yet, but that's about it.

Mid pull-up

She crawls everywhere, pulls up on anything within her reach, cruises along the furniture, has about 30 words in her vocabulary and even has a few baby signs (water, milk, and eat ... although sometimes they are a bit interchangeable). She is totally off formula now and only takes her milk in a bottle at bedtime. It's sippy cups the rest of the day. She eats dinner with us at the table now and eats what we eat. It's not always an easy adjustment to all these changes, but most days, get a little better than the one before.

This picture is for my friend Alysha. Apparently putting your feet on the dinner table is a one year old thing.(Her blog has a very similar picture of her son Silas, who is 5 days older than Emma, doing the same thing.) This was from our first real family dinner with all three of us eating the same meal at the same time at the same table. Emma wasn't as into it as Jeremy and I.

Why play with your many toys when you can play Hercules with a giant plastic tube? Or maybe she's practicing her guitar hold for the next round of Guitar Hero.

Yesterday, as she sat in her playroom, listening to a Baby Einstein CD, quietly flipping through a pile of books, I couldn't help but look at her and think how amazing it was that she could turn pages in books and sit on her haunches. She just looked so grown-up. I don't know how it happened! She just turned into this little person sometime in the last year. It's adorable to see her flip through her books almost is if she is researching a topic and comparing notes from one book to another. I wish our NICU 'family' could see her now.

Where's Emma???

Whether you've been reading since last August or joined us somewhere in between now and then, thank you for reading! I'm always amazed when I hear about a friend of a friend or the cousin of a friend that we've never met who has popped into hear about our journey through parent-and-babyhood. I haven't been very consistent with my blogging as of late, but I hope to improve my posting frequency in the up coming months. Thanks again for checking in with us to see what's happening in the Leghorn house.