Fun Developmental Progress

I keep forgetting to mention some fun new things Kinsey has been doing in the last few weeks/months. To be honest, I can't remember which things I've mentioned or not or how long she's been doing any of them. So I thought I'd just tell you about everything I can think of, even if I've told you about them before.

Kinsey does a great job putting together large blocks and stacking pretty much anything these days. She really understands how to put the blocks together and that she needs to turn them the right way to do it.

She's also recently gained an understanding of dump/fill. When she's in the tub she'll take a container and fill it with bath water and then pour it back out. Sometimes she'll even pour it into another, larger container to fill that one up. Very interesting to watch!

Something else we really like to watch her do is chew. . . It sounds silly, but Jamie and I find ourselves staring at her while she eats dinner nearly every night! It just took so much effort and time to get her to this point that we find it pretty amazing to watch. Especially when she's moving the food around in her mouth using her tongue (sometimes she still uses her finger to move the food, but more and more she's using her tongue alone to do it)!

She's also getting really good at using a fork. We still have to put the food on the fork for her most of the time, but she takes the fork from your hand or from sitting on the plate and puts it in her mouth without losing any of the food (most of the time). And just this week she's even getting good at removing the fork from her mouth after she removes the food from it - she used to keep the fork in her mouth while trying to chew the food. She also really tries to put the food on the fork herself sometimes. Sometimes she does that using her other hand to manually put it on the fork, but she also moves the fork around in the bowl or plate trying to get food on it. I don't think she's succeeded yet, but she's getting closer. This is something they're working on with her at school too.

We've also noticed she's getting better at holding onto a bowl or bag of snacks without making a mess of it. Like any kid, she still spills it sometimes, but she will often hold onto a bowl of goldfish while watching TV or a snack bag of them in the car or stroller without making a mess. She's really been enjoying goldfish lately too!

Lastly on the food front, she's really been enjoying juices lately. We realized over the summer that she now likes apple juice and while she was sick recently I started giving her pineapple juice because I read it helps with a cough and she loved that. This week we started giving her OJ and she likes that too. We're glad because we're hoping some extra vitamin C will help her immune system. Gone are the days of drinking only milk or water!

I think I've mentioned before that she was starting to help with getting dressed. Pretty much every time you get her dressed or changed she will help. For instance, when you put a shirt over her head she will put her arm up and after you get the hole in the right place she will push her arm through the sleeve and then do the same thing with the other arm. She also likes to help put her bottoms on while on the changing table, but she's usually too anxious to do it before you're ready, while you're still trying to put her diaper on. She still likes to be helpful with her socks, but mostly she likes to take them off and put them on her hands. But she has gotten good at putting her feet out, one at at time, for you to put her socks and shoes on, which is very helpful.

She also understands how to step out of her bottoms. Sometimes I get her undressed for a bath while standing in front of the tub and she has learned how to pick up one foot at a time so I can pull her shoes, socks and bottoms off her legs. And lastly, she likes to try to brush her own hair. She'll take the brush and run it through the front of her hair a little bit, usually after I've already brushed it. She's also brushed my hair a couple of times when I've stood her up on the changing table to lean her against me and pull her pants up. 

The last new thing I can think of is that she gives hugs! She'll wrap her arms around your neck when you're carrying her and hug you tight. It's the best feeling! I love getting hugs from my sweet girl!

Kinsey went back to school this week and she had a great time! She was excited to be back and didn't want to leave. Seriously, every day it was a struggle to get her to leave! The teacher said they've noticed she's making more eye contact and is more engaged in the activities.

This week I also noticed that I hadn't taken any pictures yet this month. So when we went out to visit the goats on Thursday I took the camera. I hadn't gotten any pictures of the new little girls we got a few weeks ago. They were a little skittish at first, but they've gotten over that now, especially if you have treats in your hand! I took Kinsey in the pen with them, sat her in her chair and gave her some treats for them and took pictures. One of the new little girls, Bella, was really determined to get the treats from Kinsey even though she was holding her hand tightly closed, which resulted in a funny video of Kinsey laughing at her.

Getting Better & Dr Follow-up Visits

Kinsey really started to get back to acting like herself over the weekend. Her cough was gone by Tuesday and that's when her personality really came back - I miss her laugh and smile when she's sick! Anyway, she's totally over it now, but she stayed home all week anyway at the advice of her pediatrician.

I've been rather concerned about sending her back to school because CO is one of the states that's been hit hard by that Enterovirus you've probably heard about on the news. As of Monday, there were apparently 900 cases treated at Children's in Denver (glad we didn't take Kinsey down there!) and now we're hearing the hospital she was at up here is sending 1 kid a day down to Children's with it. Something that's landing perfectly healthy children in the hospital definitely had (and has) us concerned! The hospital diagnosed Kinsey with Bronchiolitis, which is the same thing she had last time she ended up in the hospital, but her pediatrician thinks she might have actually had Enterovirus instead. Hard to say because they never tested her for anything, and there's not even a definitive test for either of those anyway. So for now, we'll hope that she actually had Enterovirus so we can say we got that over with and don't have to worry about her catching it in the future.

So I spoke with one of Kinsey's teachers about steps we could take to keep her healthy. I already know they do a great job of sanitizing the room and toys after her class and after the afternoon class each day, but I also know they interact with the other classroom (Kinsey's class has only 7 kids, but the other class has 30 and I hear them coughing and sniffling all the time!). But after speaking with her teacher I learned they haven't been interacting with the other class yet this year, so I'm not sure what they could do to help us avoid germs. And, to be honest, no one in her class is sick, so she probably didn't even get this from school.

For now, I'm cracking down on cleaning public things before she touches them or covering them up (like shopping carts) and washing her hands more often. I also need to go to the store and get a vitamin suggested by a friend. It's called Daycare Defense and she says it really helps her daughter in combination with vitamin C. I was giving Kinsey a multivitamin last year, but it didn't seem to make a difference so I slacked off on it. But this one is specifically to boost the immune system so I'm hoping it will work better.

During this cold I started giving Kinsey pineapple juice, which it turns out she really likes! I read somewhere that it works better for a cough than cough syrup, which she won't take, so I figured it was worth a try. I really think it helped. And 1 cup of pineapple juice has about 50% of daily vitamin C, so I'm sure that had something to do with how quickly she recovered from this cold. So we're going to keep giving her that and maybe try OJ too. I'll try just about anything to keep my sweet girl healthy!

When we had a follow-up visit with the pediatrician on Tuesday, she also clarified the restrictions for the albuterol. We can give it to Kinsey if she needs it, but maybe only half a dose and not as frequently. Really we only use it if she has a reaction to an animal or when she's sick, but it's good to know we can still give it to her if she has an allergic reaction to Bailey or something. She also said we could give her Benadryl, so I need to pick up some of that.

And today we had a follow-up with the Cardiologist - well, sort of. We waited an hour past our appointment time before he came in to see her, ordered an EKG and Echo and it took another 20 minutes for those people to come in. By this time, we were both annoyed (Kinsey had already had a major meltdown because she was bored and getting hungry). They managed to perform the EKG, although she was screaming a little, but when the guy came in to do the Echo, she just started screaming bloody murder! I was able to calm her down, but as soon as he came back and tried to connect her for the Echo, she started screaming again. And I mean SCREAMING! The Dr decided not to do it because she was too upset - in fact, she didn't stop screaming until we left the building! I think all the IV torture when she was in the hospital has got her afraid of doctors when they start coming at her. :(

So the cardiologist said the EKG didn't show the WPW (irregular rhythm) today so it's intermittent, which is why he thought last year that it was gone. His actual words were that it was naive of him to think it had cleared up! Way to instill confidence Dr! Anyway, he says intermittent WPW is never dangerous so not to be worried. But he also said the fact that it returned, or has been there all along, makes him wonder if the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (thickening of the heart muscle) has gotten worse. He needed to do the Echo to really know, but that didn't work out. He did say from listening to her heart, he didn't think it had changed. The end result was to come back in a year, unless we notice anything different about her that we think could be caused by her heart. Pretty pointless waste of time really.

The plan is for Kinsey to return to school next week. I just hope she can actually keep going without getting sick!

A Fun Day with Gramma, but then A Bad Week

Kinsey's Gramma and Wayne were here last weekend, driving through on their way from Oregon to Arkansas. They came in on Saturday evening and spent a fun day with Kinsey and Jamie on Sunday while I was working a booth with my Sweet Pea Boutique items. They went to get our last 2 goats together - two more girls that we named Cali and Bella.

Gramma and Wayne left very early on Monday and since I was working my booth again (my first two day event, which was a huge success by the way) and Jamie was working on a fence for all the goats, my dad watched Kinsey most of the day. He noticed that she was sneezing quite a bit, but otherwise seemed fine. She seemed OK to us too and I took her to school on Tuesday morning because I thought maybe it was just allergies from the weather changing a bit (Fall is definitely setting in around here). Her teachers said she was pretty grumpy and wanted to lay down quite a bit and by mid-afternoon she was coughing often and obviously developing a cold, but she was eating and drinking well and acting fine, so we were hoping it would be just a simple cold. No such luck.

Tuesday night was rough with her up coughing, gagging and crying most of the night. In the morning she started throwing up from all the mucus and refused to eat or drink anything. I tried all the usual things, but nothing seemed to help. Her oxygen levels were in the low 80s and after a conversation with the Dr, we were planning to take her in the late afternoon for a chest x-ray to be sure it wasn't pneumonia. I finally got her stomach to settle down and she took a long nap on the floor in front of the TV, but when she woke up she was worse. When I checked her oxygen levels she was down to the 60s so my dad and I took her to the ER and Jamie met us there.

The chest x-ray was clear and all blood work came back normal, but they admitted her because of her low oxygen levels - which we knew would happen when we decided to take her in. The pediatrics department went a little overboard not knowing exactly what they were dealing with and put her in the PICU room (I can't wait to see the bill for that!). Anyway, they got her set up with oxygen - Jamie actually came up with a new idea to tape the tubing to her shirt to keep it near her face (she absolutely refuses to wear the mask or a nasal canula, so we just do "blow-by" for her, but that means we need to keep the tube near her face, which is difficult every time she moves, so this was a great solution). After some evaluation, the Dr decided she would probably be taken off PICU status at midnight (nice of him to consider that so we wouldn't get charged for a 2nd day of that level of care that wasn't necessary).

Everything was looking good for us to go home the next day, until very early Thursday morning when the monitors went crazy - something about Kinsey's heart rate was really concerning, at least to them. This happened about 20 minutes after they gave her an albuterol treatment. Kinsey seemed fine to me, so I wasn't too concerned about their monitors going nuts. But they ordered an EKG at 3 am and sent that off to Kinsey's cardiologist at Children's to review and give his opinion. And then they started acting like we might not go home that day. So we didn't get much rest that night (after practically no rest the night before either), but Kinsey finally got some sleep from about 5 - 10 am.

And that's when it got really crazy. They gave her another breathing treatment when she woke up, this time using a different medicine even though we'd never had a problem with albuterol before, but they were concerned about her heart and hadn't heard back from the cardiologist yet. Well, that was a bad idea because her heart reacted worse to this medicine! The monitor went crazy again and before I knew it they were clearing the room of stuff and about 20 people were surrounding Kinsey. They brought in an EKG machine right away to catch her heart rhythm on paper so they could send it to her cardiologist again. They kept trying to "snap" her out of the irregular rhythm by putting ice packs on her head, which made her extremely angry (she was already screaming mad at this point anyway). Then they started talking about giving her a medicine that would "snap" her out of it, but would also make her look like she's having a seizure for 30 seconds! Thankfully the weren't able to give her that medicine because her IV wasn't working anymore (and that's how it's administered). I say thankfully because she didn't need it. In the middle of all this chaos, they got the cardiologist on the phone and he said it was the WPW that she used to have and not something terrible like they were afraid of, and nothing to worry about (well, kind of. More on that below). So they stopped torturing her and freaking out about the heart rhythm, but then decided they needed to get a new IV in since the old one wasn't working (which it took them 3 tries to do in the ER the day before - torture!). Three nurses them proceeded to try to get a new IV in, which ended up taking another 3 tries! I don't think I've ever seen her so mad . . . and that's saying a lot! Poor thing was just screaming her head off - I think people on another floor could hear her! And I was crying because I couldn't stand watching them do this to my baby. I was able to pick her up to help calm her down some and Jamie arrived since I had messaged him about all this mess. This was about 2 hours of madness and after everyone finally left her alone, Kinsey went back to sleep for a little while.

Since the Drs weren't worried about the heart rhythm anymore and she was actually doing well with her oxygen levels - staying in the high 80s without the tube nearby, they changed their tune and said we would be able to go home that afternoon! Kinsey ate and drank some and was playing and watching TV a little and we were all ready to get out of there. As usual, they weren't going to let us go without taking oxygen home with us, which is fine, as long as we get to go home and get some rest! (Jamie, my dad and I all caught her cold, so we really needed a good night's sleep).

So we got home late yesterday and Kinsey's been doing fine since then. In fact, by this afternoon you wouldn't have known she was so sick just 2 days ago! She was playing, dragging the oxygen tubing around behind her as she scooted from toy to toy. She's been eating and drinking well too. She's got a bad cough, but it doesn't seem to be bothering her. Her oxygen levels are in the high 80s without the oxygen and we're pretty much only using it at night to be sure it doesn't drop too much while she's sleeping.

For now, we're not allowed to give her an albuterol treatment, until we have a follow-up with her cardiologist. They gave us a steroid medicine to give her for a few days to reduce the inflammation of her lungs and we have the oxygen here for as long as we need it. We have a follow-up appointment with Kinsey's regular doctor on Tuesday.

So it was good and bad news that the heart rhythm thing wasn't a huge concern. Good that it wasn't a dangerous thing they were all concerned about, but bad that the WPW appears to be back. You may remember, Kinsey was originally diagnosed with Wolfe-Parkinson-White Disease (WPW) when she was 6 months old. This is an irregular heart rhythm caused by an electrical misfiring of the heart. About a year ago, the Dr said it had cleared up on its own (which often happens with WPW) and she no longer needed to be on medication for it and didn't need to be seen to cardiology for 2 years. The WPW appeared to be set off by the breathing treatments since it happened both times right after a treatment was given, but we've never known of a problem like that before. The cardiologist isn't especially concerned and said we don't need to do anything right away, aside from avoiding the breathing treatments, and we just need to make a follow-up appointment with him in the next month or two. So we'll know more about it then.

In the meanwhile, we'll continue to heal from this cold and hope that was our "annual" trip to the hospital. Here are some pictures of Kinsey playing with her oxygen machine and some of the tubing and stuff we brought home. Getting back to usual self already!