Another Episode

We had another episode with Elijah a couple weekends ago. He was starting to have some wheezing problems on a Thursday and we gave him a couple nebulizer treatments and they weren't seeming to work so we decided to bring him into urgent care. While we were there they decided to be safe and send us to the hospital where we ended up staying for 2 nights. Elijah did fine, they had to put him on antibiotics and steroids and tamiflu (even though he tested negative for Influenza A and B - they are just giving it to everyone just in case... kind of silly if you ask me...). Apparently when the nebulizer treatments are not effective, that means he needs to go on steroids on top of that to open his airways furthur.

So the weekend was no big deal, they just put him on the drugs and on the nebulizer treatments and watched him to make sure nothing serious happened. They sent us home on Saturday and as we've finished the course of the drugs he has been totally fine.

We had to bring him in for a follow-up on Thursday to our regular pediatric office. Our doctor was out of town so we saw someone else. Since she didn't know our history she was looking on the computer to see what they did in the hospital over the weekend and she says, "So it looks like they diagnosed him with asthma..." Chris and I looked at each other all confused and told her that no one ever said that to us. We've actually been told specifically several times at different places that they won't diagnose asthma until a child is about 10 years old, because it is something that has to observed over time. The doctor talking to us then told us that typically when a child is this young they call it "reactive airway disorder." She also said that when kids have this problem this young they almost always grow out of it. Whereas if they don't have breathing problems until after they are about 3, they are more likely to have asthma their whole life. So that is encouraging that he will likely grow out of it.

Well here are a couple of pictures from the latest hospital stay, hopefully we won't have more anytime soon!

Here's Elijah getting himself all tangled up in his wires, as usual...

Giving mommy some good lovings :-)

Spinny Spinny Spin

Bubbles!

Weekend Scare

We had another small scare with Elijah this weekend. Chris had drill so we had to go up to MN. Before we left on Thursday we noticed that Elijah was getting a small case of the sniffles so we decided to bring him in to the doctor just to make sure he was ok to travel. The doctor didn't find any sign of infection and said the only thing he would recommend is nebulizer treatments if he starts having trouble breathing (we didn't have a nebulizer, but planned on getting one). We decided to make the trip and got to the cities Thursday night and Elijah was doing fine. As the night went on I kept waking up hearing him being restless. Finally he woke up crying at about 5am and I went to get him and he was breathing fairly quickly. Chris and I decided we didn't want to take any chances so we brought him to the emergency room that was closest to us. When we got in his oxygen level was in the 80's, which is not high enough. They brought him into the room and put him on oxygen right away and then a few minutes later they brought us a nebulizer treatment and had me give that to him. After that was finished his oxygen level was in the high 90's, which is great!

The doctor we had was telling us that he would prefer to transfer us to the Children's Hospital in St. Paul since there are specialists there and he was concerned about Elijah's history. However, he called over there and they told him that all they would do at that point was watch Elijah and see how he does for a while. So the doctor decided to let him sit for about an hour without any oxygen and see if his stats stayed up, and they did!

It was quite obvious that all Elijah needed was a nebulizer treatment and it helped his breathing significantly. The doctor told us that because of everything that Elijah went through, it is likely that every time he even gets a little cold he is going to have "bronchio-spasms" and his airways may swell a bit and he will need a nebulizer treatment to help with his breathing.

All we needed at that point was to get a nebulizer of our own. We waited for quite a while before the respiratory therapist came to talk to us and when she finally did she had great news! She said she had made some calls and found a company that had a gently used portable nebulizer that they were willing to just give us! That was a HUGE blessing! Nebulizers tend to be around $200, so to get one for free was absolutely a God thing! And even above and beyond that, the man delivered it to the house we were staying at in the cities! It was so great!

After that whole ordeal we went about the rest of our weekend just fine! Elijah got a nebulizer treatment about every 4-6 hours (except overnight) and he did great with it. Now that we are home he is down to maybe just 2 treatments a day, and I think we might be done with those by tomorrow.

Praise the Lord for getting us out of that one! It was pretty scary for Chris and I on Friday morning, but God is faithful as always :-)

Elijah's Vocabulary

So I have been trying to get a video of Elijah playing outside in the leaves on here for several days now and it is not letting me. Well, if you have access to Facebook, the video is there. If not, I'm sure there will be more videos soon :-)

Anyway, I thought I would just write a quick post to update everyone on Elijah's ever-growing vocabulary. These are all of the words he has said (or at least come really close to) so far.

1) Touchdown
2) Uh-Oh
3) That
4) Ball
5) Car
6) Shirt
7) Door
8) Shower

"Touchdown", as you all know, was his first word. He rarely says it anymore, but he will throw his arms up and make the touchdown sign still. He says "uh-oh" fairly often and "that" (or "dat") ALL THE TIME. He says "car" and "ball" quite a bit too whenever he sees one. As for the last three, ("shirt", "door", and "shower") he said all of those for the first time last night. And "shirt" he said without any prompting at all. He pointed at my shirt and said it. It wasn't perfect of course, but I could tell what he was saying.

We are very excited that he is expanding his vocabulary, and last night was a really big step because he said 3 different words, and he would repeat them after we said them. Up until now whenever we have tried to get him to say a word he just looks at us like we are crazy. So I'm hoping now that he is going to start trying to say more - he's so stinking cute when he talks!

Halloween

Halloween is definitely one of my favorite days of the year, it's the only day I can purposely look ridiculous and not only does no one care, but they give you candy for it! It's really quite amazing. So since Elijah was born I am even more involved in Halloween because I want him to grow up with lots of traditions to hold on to. So every Halloween there are lots of things to do, but only a few that we absolutely must do. The first, of course, is carve pumpkins.


These are our pumpkins from this year. The one on the left is Chris', then Elijah's, then mine is on the right. Silly me, I didn't take any pictures of the actual carving, but Elijah wasn't all that interested in it. He just liked to hug the pumpkins and roll them around. Crazy kid. Next year I think he will be very excited about it, at least about scooping out the guts of the pumpkin :-)
Another absolute must of Halloween is to dress up. The nice thing about Chris and I having kids so young is that I never took a break from dressing up for Halloween. Before we had Elijah I was still young enough that I didn't look ridiculous, and now I have the excuse that I have to dress up with my son. It's great :-) Now, Elijah has only had 2 years of Halloweens so far, but I have decided that as long as I can get away with it, I'm going to try to do a theme costume for the 3 of us. So instead of dressing up in our own individual costumes that have nothing to do with each other, we are all going to dress up as a unit. For example, the first year we took Elijah trick-or-treating it was just me and him since Chris had drill that weekend (Chris did end up coming and surprising us that night, but we didn't have a costume planned for him, so he ended up being a soldier - convenient, since he was already in his ACU's) so we dressed up as Cruella De Vil and a dalmation puppy.

Now this year Chris was with us so I was trying to think of something for all 3 of us. I came across a lot of great ideas, but they were too hard to make or too expensive to buy and I was having a hard time finding something simple and cheap, yet really fun. So finally I came across the idea of a s'more - one person is a graham cracker, one person is a chocolate bar, and one person is a marshmallow. Now my instant reaction was that Elijah would make a perfect marshmallow :-) So the decision was made! I ended up making the costumes from scratch. Unfortunately I don't know how to sew and I really don't have a creative bone in my body, but I AM a perfectionist so they didn't end up looking half bad if I do say so myself. Ideally, I would have put a lot more time and effort into them to make them full body costumes, but I just didn't have either time or effort this year to do that. But all I ended up having to buy was the white fleece for the marshmallow costume, which was about $4 - not bad for 3 costumes!

That's us! Now here is an up-close of our little marshmallow, since he's really the star of this show!
Want to know a secret? I mentioned I couldn't sew... Here is how I held together the marshmallow costume...
Yeah, those are binder clips. Shh... don't tell. I grabbed an extra piece of fleece and covered those up. Frankly, I think they worked great, made it real easy to put on and take off again, which is necessary with our crazy little guy.
Now the third part of Halloween that is an absolute must is to go trick-or-treating. How to define trick-or-treating is debatable, but no matter what, we have to get candy! I know there are sometimes church events or school events where you play games for candy, and there are trunk-or-treats where everyone lines up their cars and hands candy out of their trunks, or there is the original door-to-door candy raid, which happens to be my personal favorite. That is what we have done all 2 of Elijah's Halloweens so far and it has been a blast. Elijah doesn't quite know it yet, but he is a fantastic trick-or-treater. He's so stinking cute, he could probably get all the candy at every house we go to!
Well that is my blog about how much I love Halloween, I will be taking costumes ideas for next year anytime. I've got my heart set on Barney, Betty, and Bam-Bam Rubble, but I have no idea how to pull it off without buying the costumes. Maybe if I start saving now... Who am I kidding, I'm not THAT crazy about Halloween :-P

Identifying Body Parts