The Renton Family: 9 months

Apologies for the delay in posting....we're still playing catch-up after last week's medical debacle. Spending all day Sunday and Monday in the ER was only half the battle. She continued to throw up until Thursday, with intermittent bouts of diarrhea, so we were constantly on guard watching for signs of dehydration and panicking over her lack of keeping anything down. She only ate about 6 ounces of formula and 4 ounces of juice/pedialyte each day. We saw a new pediatric GI specialist on Tuesday, Dr. Reid, who is the chief of pediatric gastroentology at Texas Children's Hospital. Dr. Reid explained that she was looking at the case as 2 sets of different problems: 1) the acute illness or condition that was causing the vomiting and 2) the big-picture problem of why she was not eating enough. Caroline's growth up to this point has always hovered right in the middle of the 50th-60th percentile. This past month she achieved no growth whatsoever (even lost a pound during the last week) and now her growth percentile is slipping, which makes the doctor concerned. She ordered some blood tests and a stool sample test and also a swallow study as a starting point for figuring out why Caroline isn't eating enough.

And above all else, she needs to be able to eat solid food! Currently Caroline is entirely off solid foods completely; it's been that way for about a month now. When I first took her off solids she seemed to do better (eating 24 ounces consistently) for about a week. Then we met with the nutritionist, who suggested starting back on solids one food at a time beginning with bananas. So she ate one 4 ounce serving of bananas for a few days, and then the problems came back...fussing, not pooping, only eating 13 ounces of formula. So whatever the problem is, eating solid foods makes it worse. Until they figure out what's going on I have no desire to bother with solids.

Last Thursday she went to her regular pediatrician for her 9 month well-baby checkup (haha) and good thing we went, because when he peeked into her ears he informed us she had a double ear infection and promptly put her on eardrops and antibiotics. I'm still not clear if the vomiting last week was due to the constipation, the ear infection, or a stomach bug....or all 3? After the ear infection diagnosis, there was also the blood in her diaper on Thursday afternoon, which was also pretty scary to see. She didn't have a diaper rash or any visible cuts or wounds on her bottom, so I have no idea what that was about. I called the doctor and she didn't have any ideas either. So far we haven't seen any more bloody diapers ....instead, we've had a whopping dose of diarrhea and terrible diaper rash this week from the antibiotics. We saw the doctor again yesterday and he switched her antibiotic and gave us a prescription diaper cream, so I'm waiting to see if that helps at all.

And in the midst of all these medical fiascos, Bill went to go vote on Tuesday morning and got in a wreck and his car was totaled. It wasn't his fault...he was just stopped at a stop sign when 2 other cars wrecked and one spun out and hit his car. Naturally the driver at fault did not have insurance so we're having to file claims with our insurance, get a rental car, and go new car shopping. All while the baby was in and out of doctors offices and testing labs. Good thing Nana came to the rescue! She flew in on Tuesday to help with the baby and it was such a relief to have another pair of eyes watching her and monitoring her symptoms and offering opinions and suggestions. We can't thank Nana enough for coming to the rescue!!

adios Altima....

So that's where we are today....now back to our regularly scheduled 9 month update! Aside from the medical issues, she seems to be a happy outgoing playful ball of energy! Her favorite toy right now is her music table; she loves to push all the buttons and hear the songs. She just learned how to 'dance' and it is tooo cute!!

She also still adores Winnie too, and he is slowly....very slowly...getting used to her approaching him. Now he'll withstand her for a few seconds before he runs away from her. The other night I even caught the 2 of them almost playing! He had his bunny and she was trying to grab it. For one bright shiny moment my far-flung fantasies of baby and pug playing together almost came true....and then she spotted the stairs and abandoned him in favor of pursuing the stairs.

She's pulling up on everything she can get her hands on and reaching for every object within arm's reach. She gets a big kick out of anything she hasn't seen or explored before...for instance, the egg crate foam mattress topper my mom had on the twin bed downstairs. Such a funny interesting texture she of course had to try to get it in her mouth. Everything goes in the mouth! Step 1: grab it with hands and turn it over. Step 2: try to put it in the mouth.

She is babbling a lot and says 'dada', but I still haven't heard 'mama' yet. We practice that every day....so far no luck.

In addition to her achievements, we have some challenges to work on as well. She has a very limited capacity for self-soothing. Once she gets upset and worked up, she wants someone to come pick her up and soothe her. I know this is partly my fault because she was in pain and cried so much for the first few months of her life that my goal was to hold her, rock her, soothe her as best I could and do whatever it took to calm her down. Well she's 9 months old now and we've got to catch up on the self-soothing skills. Parent-teacher conferences at her school were last week (which we missed due to all the illness craziness), but her teachers sent home the standard report on 'how your child is progressing this year.' The first item stated "We are working with Caroline to learn how to self-soothe." Read: your kid is a crybaby who needs a lot of coddling. At least we have one failsafe item though...the magic tshirt! I send one of my tshirts to school with her, and the teachers swear that if she's crying and just won't calm down, all they have to do is give her the tshirt and she calms down. Now we must work on learning how to calm down without the tshirt...

And the other big challenge is still separation anxiety. She still wants to be with me almost all the time. She doesn't want Daddy to give her a bath, or Nana to give her a bottle, or anyone else to put her to sleep...she wants ME to do all those things. She is making slow progress at school though...she started taking a decent nap and taking a bottle from her teachers. We just need to keep practicing.

Last but not least, a little picture lagniappe from all the family and friends we've visited within the last month!