Three Little Peanuts: Isabella

This vent is so interesting!

Well, some people have been asking why I haven't posted about Bella in awhile, so I thought I better update. I think I have just been avoiding it b/c it always seems like there is so much going on.

Her physical therapy is going great. I have been working with her everyday on exercises to help her right side. She has come a long way, and it only took a few weeks of this to get her looking alot better. At this point, probably only myself and PT might be able to see that she uses her left side more, so I feel better about that. She is starting beginning crawling, and it's so exciting to see her scoot across the room to get something. I have noticed her right eyelid drooping more when she is tired, but it doesn't seem excessive when she is wide awake. She is still doing some of her strange head jerking, so hopefully nothing comes of that. The doctor mentioned seizures. It seems to be more confined to when she is tired. The doctor is watching her explosive head growth, so hopefully these things are just all coincidence. I didn't push the issue too much b/c overall things are going better than a month ago, and she is starting to reach some important milestones. Time will tell a lot.

Feeding has been interesting. She is now on all formula. The doctor wanted us to keep her on higher cal stuff, but getting whole bottles of that made her spit up huge volumes. We stopped that and moved on to soy. After being on that for 3 weeks she got an awful case of eczema, to the point where her calves were peeling. I took her in and they gave me a steroid cream with bactroban to put on it. They also sent in some blood (GETTING IT WAS NOT EASY!) for food allergy testing, since Savannah had such a problem with that. The doctor actually called at lunch today to let me know they all came back negative! WOOHOO. I am SOOO happy. Food allergies can be awful to deal with. The cream has cleared the eczema up wonderfully and so she said to keep it for the next flare-up. We ended up going off the soy, as our living room carpet was starting to smell like one of those dog food grain elevator things you pass on the side of the road. We will have to borrow mom's carpet cleaner (hint, hint- we'll be there Easter:)) Now we are trying Gentlease to see if she keeps that down any better. It might just be that formula is harder for her to tolerate the doc said. She is still taking Prevacid. It's hard, because she spits up such huge amounts, and it isn't getting any better with age. Bella is also trying to take baby food. She loves thin fruits and rice cereal, but other than that she hates baby food. I am wondering if she will go straight to table food. We tried Cheerios yesterday and they were a big hit.

Sleeping. Ah, sleeping. Well, after Todd and I slept on an air mattress in the living room for a week, we decided the crib needed to be moved back out of our room and into Savannah;s. We just couldn't take the screaming anymore, and our backs couldn't take the air mattress. Originally, we wanted to wait until she was sleeping through the night (at least kind of- without screaming) to put the girls together. Also, we wanted to wait until Savannah got over the idea of hurling herself into Bella's crib. Well, we put her in there anyway. Probably not our smartest move as Bella's screaming just wakes Savannah up. This presents us with the problem of having to run in there to quiet Bella's screaming, which is ALL THE TIME. For some reason, the "crying it out" thing has not worked with her. A few times we just let them both scream, but when Bella finally quits for a minute, Savannah picks up where she left off and just gets Bella all riled up again. I guess eventually Bella's screaming will stop. I think our hair is going to go gray very fast.

Bella had her last home health visit yesterday. It went good. SHe got her last RSV shots. It will be nice to have that expense over with!:)

I am going to sign off with a few pictures from the 81 degree day we had last week. Yes, in MN, in March. Today its back in the 20's. yuck.