David's First Vacation.

About 9 months ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to one of these daily deal sites that was offering 3 nights at the beach in Pensacola for like $150.  I’m not a big beach guy (I don’t like the ubiquitous sand and salt, plus I tend to spontaneously combust if I’m left out in the sun too long), but I figured David and Christy would enjoy it, and more importantly, it would be a good dry run vacation for future Disney trips.  Christy and I have become big fans of vacationing in the off-season, and work has been slow-ish, so on Thursday of the week before last, we decided to leave for Pensacola on the following Monday.
So on Monday morning, we woke up, packed up the car and headed out.  The car ride was pretty uneventful.  We left right about the time that David was ready for his first nap of the day, so he slept through about the middle of Mississippi.  We stopped at the Alabama welcome center, had some lunch (Golden Potstickers FTW), then drove for another couple of hours and arrived in Pensacola around 3 in the afternoon.  

As one might expect, we immediately got beach-ready and headed to the ocean.  David has a sandbox at home that he loves, so he was pretty excited about all of the sand on the beach.  I think he’d have been happy to just sit there and dig for 4 days.  He wasn’t quite as certain about the ocean, but once we’d walked in the edge of the surf a little bit, he was ready to go out with mom.  Christy carried him out to 3 or 4 feet of depth, and he had a great time kicking his legs in the water until a wave inundated him, then he was ready to go play in the sand some more.  And that was basically how the whole trip went, with lunch and dinner mixed in.  We did have a small accident on the last evening we were there - Christy was playing chase with David on the boardwalk while we were waiting for dinner, and he tripped and did a face-plant on the concrete.  He got a little bit of a bloody nose, but all in all, not that bad.  He didn’t like it very much, though.  

Obviously this wasn’t our first short road trip with David, but I’m happy to say that the travelling experience is getting better every time.  This one didn’t really have any fussing or crying until about 30 minutes outside of Pensacola.  So, basically 4 hours of happy toddler.  We turned his car seat around before we left, so he is now facing the windshield.  I think he likes it a lot better.  I certainly do - now when he whines or makes noise, I can see that nothing is wrong and just ignore him.  And the hotel-room-with-a-baby experience wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected either.  By the time we got settled and ready for bed at night, David was so tired that he probably would have slept on the floor, so my worries about him having issues with a foreign sleeping environment were unfounded.  Anyway, I have high hopes that another 12 months or so will find us with a 2 year old that is ready for 12 hours in the car to Orlando.

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15 month cardiology checkup

Well I’m a slacker.  I know that this is already widely known, but I figured I’d state it for the record.

David had his 15 month cardiology checkup on the 6th of October.  There was literally nothing to report, so I haven’t felt particularly compelled to write this.  But since the whole point of this blog is to help people keep up-to-date with David and how he’s doing, I figure I’d be a terrible person if I just never wrote a checkup post at all.

So here’s the update:  nothing.  In fact, our normal doctor was tending to an emergency at another hospital in town, so we saw the guy that I think they just hired as their 4th doctor.  He listened to david’s heart, looked at his blood pressure and oxygen saturation, and basically said, “yup, looks good to me!”  He increased David’s Enalapril dose a little bit in order to keep up with his growth (note to people with emergency info sheets - I will be sending you a new one), scheduled the 18 month checkup, and that was it.  The truth is, we really only get checked once every 6 months.  The ones in between that are just growth checks, just to let the doctor put his eyeballs on David and make sure he still looks fine.  And thus far, he still does.

In other news, David is now walking like he invented it.  The only time he crawls anymore is to traverse steps and to hide.  He has gained an affinity for being chased around the house, so we do a lot of that.  He still loves water, so he spends lots of time outside looking for puddles or other random collections of water in which he can splash.  And since the weather is getting cooler and nicer, mommy and daddy are okay with this.

Pirate Face

Ugh.

Well I guess my baby couldn’t stay a baby forever.  I think he’s officially toddling.  

I have mixed emotions.  On one hand, I’m proud (and glad) that he is progressing normally.  He gets so excited when he does it, so that makes me happy too.  But it also means that he’s growing up faster than I’d like.  Some lady in Whole Foods one day told me (when I was lamenting him growing up too fast) that every stage would be my favorite.  So far she’s been right, but I still don’t have to like leaving the last one behind.  

Like everything else, he is awesome at it.  It’s pretty clear that he walks better than any other toddler, ever.  As a compromise, he does still let me hold him, so that’s good.  I can also still beat him in a footrace, which is important.  I do, however, need to start planning for when he can outrun me.  I’m sure he will get into a lot more stuff now, but luckily I’m not the stay-at-home mom.  But you should all say a prayer for Christy.  She will need it.

Smartest. Baby. Ever.

One of the odd quirks about having surgery done at a world class hospital is that those hospitals tend to be teaching hospitals.  Which also means that the doctors are simultaneously awesome doctors and medical faculty.  In order to be an academic, one has to publish research.  And who better to do research on than your patients!  I think it’s standard at teaching hospitals for the patients to be asked to be a part of like a kabillion studies.  We were approached about participating in 3 of them (I think), 2 of which I remember, and 1 of which we decided to participate in.  And when it’s 24 hours before your 3-day old has open heart surgery, 3 is a pretty good approximation for infinity.

The winner of our particular study lottery is researching how being on a heart-lung bypass machine at less than a week old can affect future brain development.  As it turns out, stopping a heart can lead to oxygen deprivation in the brain (who’d have thought?), and having oxygen deprivation in your brain at 3 days old can cause developmental issues down the road.  So they gave him their drug (some existing drug that’s supposed to stimulate red blood cell production) or a placebo (don’t know which), did a brain MRI before surgery, a brain MRI after surgery, monitored blood oxygen saturation during surgery and did a developmental test in his first month of life.  Rinse and repeat for surgery #2.  Then the plan was to do more developmental tests at 1 year old, at 3 years old, and at 5 years old.

This past Monday was the 1 year developmental checkup.  Basically, they gave him some standard baby things to do, and he did them.  Then they gave him some basic reading and arithmetic.  Then more advanced reading, basic differential calculus, and an IQ test (his resulting IQ was about 270).  Then they just gave him a pencil and some paper and he went ahead and proved Fermat’s last theorem. (He later told me that he thought Fermat’s birthday was the August 15th and that he was trying to be funny.  Turns out Fermat’s birthday is the 17th.  Oops.  I don’t think the tester caught the joke.)  When it was over the tester said, “well I certainly don’t see any developmental issues.”  I guess she was being sarcastic.  I’m sure she meant to say that he’s the smartest baby she had ever encountered.

Winning!

One Year Checkup, Part Deux

I’m sure after reading about the cardiology one year checkup a couple weeks ago, you were all wondering, “OMG WHAT ABOUT THE PEDIATRICIAN?  SURELY THERE’S ANOTHER DOCTOR UPDATE!!”  Well never fear, we have plenty of doctor’s appointments and I am happy to post a report on each one.  The truth is, good defined milestones for posting these things aren’t always obvious (I mean, if I posted every time David did something cute, Google would run out of storage), but I know that when there’s a doctor’s appointment, I should post.

This past Tuesday was the 12 month pediatric checkup.  After David had finished running some game on the nurses and thoroughly exploring the room we were in, the doctor came in.  He looked at the chart, and basically the first thing he says is, “Looks like his growth has slowed a little more than we’d like.”  I didn’t need to look over at Christy to know that she was having the same internal reaction that I was.  Namely, “If we have to have another knock down fight with a doctor about feeding David, I’m going to hit someone.”

You see, at TCH after the first surgery, they were VERY paranoid about him not growing fast enough.  So paranoid, in fact, that they presumed a massive problem would be there even before it happened.  And I mean, I understand that his heart is less efficient than normal, and that he’s going to burn more calories than normal.  I really understand.  But after we’ve told one doctor, “no, we’re not going to add formula to his breast milk, Christy is just going to nurse him unless we actually SEE a growth problem,” I’d hope that they’d write that down and that would be the end.  Of course, people are stupid, so they never do things that make sense.  It literally took Christy telling one of them, “GFY, I’m nursing him.” before they just left it alone at the hospital.  And then, of course, every time we went back for a checkup they would AGAIN inform us that we needed to be fortifying his milk EVEN THOUGH HIS GROWTH WAS NORMAL.  So, needless to say, we are somewhat touchy about this particular issue.

Back to Tuesday.  So the doctor is worried about his growth.  He asks what we’re feeding him.  We tell him.  He says, “well you’re going to think this sounds a little crazy (Paul and Christy brace for impact), but I need you to add some heavy cream to his oatmeal in the morning.  Or butter, if you feed him grits.”  That's it? Really?  He just wants us to make sure we’re feeding David enough.  He did ask for us (read: Christy) to keep a log of what David eats and to bring it back in 2 weeks.  I was shocked at the level of sanity.  From the way he talked, it sounded like he has the same opinion of dietetics that we do - basically that it’s junk science.  Seriously, these are the people who have made America the most obese and unhealthy place in the world, why the hell should we listen to anything they say?  But I digress.

The nutshell version of all of that is that David should be 20 lbs instead of 18.5 (he’s basically been on the 5% growth curve since he was born), that we need to supplement some of his meals with butter and/or cream, and that we have to keep a log of his food for 2 weeks.  The logging isn’t particularly exciting (we have done enough logging, thank you very much), but I guess it could be worse.  For his part, David is enjoying the new diet.  He gets oatmeal with coconut milk (delicious btw) or cheese grits in the mornings, he had indian food swimming in butter on tuesday evening, and today he had grilled wild coho salmon with a side of creamed spinach for lunch.  The docs always said that he’d be skinny.  I guess we will see.

Obligatory David Picture