Big Things!

So first off I have to apologize for the lack of good pictures from these past couple of weeks! I've been sitting here trying to remember what we've done so I can blog about it, and I thought that maybe my phone camera could help jog my memory. No such luck. Apparently I was having SO much fun that I altogether forgot to take pics.....or maybe I was just too busy to be the one behind the camera lol.

First off was Max's post-surgery swallow study/follow up doctor appointment on August 12th. Unfortunately for me, his swallow study was scheduled for 12:15 in the afternoon, during my on week. Keep in mind I work graveyards, so this is right smack dab in the middle of my prime sleeping time. It's like this EVERY DARN TIME too. I've had a lot of people ask me why we don't just reschedule for my week off. Answer: We have learned the hard way, there is no rescheduling an appointment at Primary Children's unless you want to wait many more weeks for the next opening....and waiting those extra weeks really delays treatment (or getting an answer to your issue in our case). I suppose I could have stayed home and slept, but I was far too anxious and worried that I would miss something really important by not being there--getting the report of the appointment from Sam is just not the same as being able to ask the doctor himself questions, you know? So now you know why I drag my butt to every last appointment, even though it's in the middle of the night for me lol. Anyway, getting on the the appointment.....Max was kind of a stinker at first during the swallow study. He totally refused to drink from his sippy cup or regular cup and instead just had hysterics. I was getting concerned that we wouldn't get any results from the swallow study if he wouldn't swallow, so I suggested they do the one thing that Max always loves: liquid in a syringe. Thankfully that calmed him down enough and forced him to swallow, so they could do the study. The conclusion they came to is that he still is aspirating on thin liquids, but does pretty well on nectar-consistency thickened liquid. The speech therapist's advice for us was to go back to thickening his liquids and use a straw sippy cup, since that would force him to drink slower and give him more control over each swallow. She also told us we could give him regular water in the sippy cup for practice (but let me tell you, after trying that I have to disagree with the theory, because he just sounds awful as ever after drinking it). Her only theory for why Max sounded poorly when he eats kind of agreed with mine: a combination of excess saliva production and the fact that all foods contain some degree of thin liquids in them. Sam asked how long they thought it would be until Max was better, and the answer was kind of depressing. Based on the fact that he is 18 months old (most kids grow out of dysphasia by a year or so as they mature) and did not make great strides following surgery, they predicted he could be 3 or 4 before things really start to improve. I think part of that would be the fact that if he really needed speech therapy to improve weak muscles--and I actually suspect that he will based on his trouble saying certain letters already--he has to be old enough to have the logic to cooperate with us and say words on a consistent basis. Not much of our conversation really gave me much hope; I actually just wanted to go home and bury my head under my pillows at this point, and skip the whole doctor visit (figured it wouldn't be much happier ya know). Plus poor Max tripped and hit his head super hard on the wall while we were having our post swallow study consult. It was not exactly his most awesome moment ever lol. When we visited with the doctor next, he was kind of baffled by the fact that Max had made some improvement but not nearly the amount the we were expecting. He decided that he wanted to go back in and check out the surgical site, to make sure that everything had healed correctly and that nothing else was amiss. He also wanted to do another bronchial lavage to confirm that Max is not getting food in his lungs. I'm not exactly thrilled about my little baby undergoing his fifth or sixth round of anesthesia (I've seriously lost track by now) but I know it's necessary. And at least this time, it's all on the insurance company's tab :] So tomorrow morning I get to stay up way past my bedtime and go through yet another fun procedure with Max at Primary Children's. Those people must love us (or hate us haha) by now.

On the more uplifting side, I actually did the women's triathalon I signed up for! Back when I signed up in March, I had these super great intentions of training up for it....and then Max got really sick. You can guess what happened to training. I had pretty much dismissed the idea of completing the triathalon until about two days before. This little voice inside of me was like "JUST DO IT!!" so I told Sam I was going to give it a go. I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something hard, and wasn't a quitter. My goal was just to cross my butt across the finish line, and I would go however slow it took to do that. Of course I was very nervous on the morning of the race (not having trained one bit will do that to you!), but a bigger part of me was super excited to complete the task ahead: 300 meter swim, 11 mile bike ride, and 5K run. To make a long story short, I became a triathlete on Saturday August 16th at 10 am or so! While there were parts that were difficult, and I pretty much just fast walked the entire run, I overall enjoyed myself and would totally do it again. The only thing I might change (besides training a bit) is getting a softer bike seat....my tush muscles were pretty sore from sitting on the hard seat for 11 miles lol. I may have finished dead last in my age division, but I'm pretty proud of myself for not being a quitter! I am also immensely proud of the fact that after doing that big old race, I went over to my mom's house and we all had lunch and went to the planetarium downtown. The kids ran wild at the planetarium, and I was actually able to keep up with them. No sitting down and taking it easy for me!

Pre-race selfie in my new green top :] You can almost see the arm markings they gave us the day before, that ended up being the biggest pain in my butt to get off the next day!

My official race time (my number was 677 if that helps you find it faster)! I will admit I was a touch disappointed that I missed being under two hours by just a few minutes, but can't complain overall. Maybe next year I can get in under two hours!

The day after my big race we were schedule to take family pictures. Sam and I had to spend a lot of time scrubbing my race number off my arms so they wouldn't show up in our pictures, and we actually both ended up wearing pants instead of shorts because we couldn't get the number off of my leg well enough! Maybe not the best planning on my part, but luckily that was the only issue. Our photo shoot went fantastically well all things considered (nobody threw a giant fit and it was at 3 in the afternoon lol) and the location we shot at was absolutely beautiful (Mueller Park in Bountiful). Plus our photographer was amazing and gave us quite a steal of a deal on the session: 50 dollars for the session and 30 prints. I highly recommend going with Jenny Fowler if you are looking to get pictures done, she was great! We have to wait another week or so to see all of the pictures, but she sent me a sneak peek a few days ago, and seeing as how it has her watermark on it still I think it's probably kosher to post it on here: 

I was rather proud of the outfits I ended up throwing together the day before pictures, and am super glad that we don't just blend into the green background (yes I was worried about that). This would pretty much be perfect if Max didn't have that funny sneer on his face, but you can't expect too much out of an 18 month old on picture day right? He was upset that we wouldn't let him eat the dirt and leaves lol.

Unfortunately for the next two days after our family pictures I was really sick with an upset stomach and a cold. Didn't exactly make for the most fun second half of my week off. However, the day before I went back to work, some of the ladies I used to work with/still work with and I did a play date for our kiddos at the Children's Museum in SLC. All of our kids range from almost 1 to almost 4, and boys outnumber girls 5 to 1, so we're kind of in the same boat of life. Plus I love hanging out with all three of them, which helps too! I had never been to the Children's Museum (and neither had my boys) so I didn't really know what to expect. I figured that my kids would be entertained for an hour or so, and then I'd have to figure out what to do with them for the whole rest of the afternoon. I was really pleasantly surprised when my kids played there for a good three hours and I had to drag them away from the place! I think my boys' favorite part was the Bob the Builder exhibit, which unfortunately is leaving the museum in week or so :[ Consequently, I talked Sam into taking them back again on Saturday, and they still loved it just as much as the first time. I'm talking the kind of love where Jayson whacked his head on a toy and started bleeding, but still didn't want to leave to be cleaned up lol. Thank goodness for our free guest passes (I think we have enough to go two more times as well) so we don't have to pay 20 bucks each time we want to go! Although, if the kids continue to stay as occupied with the place, a membership might be well worth it. 

There is one other big thing going on in our lives. I applied for a MLS position down in Boise last week, and will hopefully hear back with a job offer on Monday! I don't know for sure if they are going to offer me a job or not, but they did seem to really like me, so I've got high hopes. There are a lot of complicated reasons for us making a big move, and I'm still trying to sort through them all, so I think I will save the long winded explanation for the next blog post I make. 

And that's our lives as of late! As always, more fun information to come next time :]

Life Can Be Really Good.....And Really Bad

Time for another bi-weekly update :]

I GOT A NEW CAR!!! Just a little bit excited about that, in case you couldn't tell haha. We decided that having a van just wasn't working out for us, in terms of commuting miles and gas prices.We were putting at least 1200 miles a month on the van, and were paying close to 300 in gas. It hurts my wallet just thinking about it again! Plus the van had just turned over 130,000 miles and we knew it was getting really close for our last chance to get a good trade on it. As good timing would have it, my friend and work cohort Cortney was in the market for a van before she moved away to Washington, so we sold it to her and her cute family last Wednesday. It was a little bittersweet though; we've had that car since Jayson was just one month old, and have made a lot of memories with it over the past three years! I still get confused when I go home and it's not parked in the garage lol. However, practicality won out, and now the van gets to make itself some new memories with Cortney's family!

Not a great picture of it, but here is my 2013 Nissan Altima, and yes, I LOVE it! I get about 500 miles to my tank of gas (admittedly it is an 18 gallon tank) which fills my heart and wallet with joy. It has lots of nice new car goodies that I'm still figuring out as I go lol. The only downside  I've discovered so far is that the car didn't come with an in-car DVD player like the van. To fix that, we purchased ourselves a twin-screen DVD player at Walmart, and now we're good to go.

Jayson enjoying the new car!

Maxwell enjoying the new car. I've really got to steal back my window shades that I left in the van, because my poor kiddos have to squint in the sun all the time now. Not to mention that those sunglasses only stayed on Max's face about five seconds longer than the picture--silly boy just won't keep them on yet!

We went up to Idaho last weekend (Friday through Monday) to visit with my sister's family, and as usual, we had a blast! We had a little birthday party for Jayson, which he thought was fantastic fun. Because it was a pirate theme party, all of the kids got to go on a treasure hunt throughout the whole house to find one of Jayson's gifts (which actually was in a treasure chest in case you were wondering): smarties, sugar free chocolate, and Capri Sun pouches. I wanted to get pictures of the kids treasure hunting, but they were too quick for me! We had a hot dog/BBQ style dinner, cake and ice cream for dessert, and balloons/decoration galore. After dinner Jayson got to open another present, which was a doctor's kit! In case you were wondering, the most argued over item was the band aid that could be worn as a bracelet.

Didn't realize that the picture was sideways, but can't really fix it now. Oh well. A shot of the cake that we all (minus Jayson and Max) enjoyed, courtesy of Walmart. My boys got to have a special chocolate cake that Sam made for them, out of cocoa powder and coconut flour (among other things). Max was crazy for it, whereas Jayson was kind of too excited with all the party going-ons to eat much.

Our three year old pirate! He got to take that hat home with him, and is still obsessed with wearing it around. It totally cracks me up :]

All seven kids enjoying their dinner. As I recall, Max ate like a beast at that meal, while Jayson ate a small amount. That's kind of the norm at our house lately--I just hope it doesn't mean that Max is going to grow out of his clothing/shoe size yet again!

Here are a few other random pictures from when we were in Idaho:

Funny story here. When we stay with my sister, Max still shares a room with us. This particular night I went to bed at about 6:30 because I had a bad headache. Max got put down for bed about 7:30 (according to Sam), but felt he wasn't tired yet and needed to wander around the room. When he finally did get tired enough to want to sleep, he was too worn out to climb back into his own bed. So where did he choose to sleep? Right on top of me! I was so sacked out that I didn't even notice either. When Sam went to bed around 11, Max finally got moved into his own bed!

Here's Maxwell-tina! He's not so sure how to feel about the headband, which I guess is a good thing. I just love his big dark-green/brown eyes and reddish hair, isn't he the most handsome thing ever?? Disclaimer: I could be just a little bit biased on that last sentence :]

As I'm sure you notice in the couple of pictures Max has in this post, he is tube free! Sadly, I'm not really sure that this means any progress for us at all. The big reason he is tube free, and has been this past week, is because we just cannot deal with it any more. Max's face was ripped up to the point of bleeding, so he kept pulling the tube out in an effort to get the painful tape off of his face. No matter how much protective stuff we put on his face, water would get in underneath the tape, and consequently cause the chaffing and bleeding. Also, the tube that we did have for him was getting old and difficult to put back in (they are only good for about a month and we had already surpassed that time period). When Sam went to get a new one from our tube supply bag, it turned out all the ones the insurance company had sent us were the wrong size. And this realization came to us the morning we were going to leave for Idaho. Awesome huh? In short, we decided that we had to call it quits with the tube. They are really only intended for short-term use, especially in kids so young like him, and we had already been doing the tube feedings for longer than the doctors had originally planned. Max has hated every day of his tube feedings as well, although I'm sure most of that is because of his no liquids by mouth restriction. It's so hard to explain to him why his big brother can drink from a cup, but he can't. So of course he screams like a wild banshee whenever we say no. That's super hard on us psychologically, always having to tell him no. It seriously wears you down to nothing after 10 weeks. It would be lying if I said that Sam and I have weathered this like pros. It has honestly been the hardest 10 weeks of our marriage, and quite possibly our lives.

After a short dilemma about what on earth we were going to do with the situation, Sam and I decided to let Max have liquids from a cup or his straw-styled sippy cup until his follow up appointment on August 12th. We knew that if we rushed him into the doctor and said we were done with the tube, and that he needed the surgery for a stomach tube ASAP, they would have just put us off until the swallow study anyway. Sad if you ask me, but entirely true. The improvement in Max's general attitude, especially at meal time, has been huge. Not perfect (he is a toddler after all!) but better. Tragically we as his parents do not really feel better. It racks me with guilt every time I hear him choke, cough, or worse yet NOT do those things, and just sound gunky and wheezy. One night while we were in Idaho (sharing a room) and he was sleeping, he actually sounded so bad that I about took him into the emergency room. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I knew we would have to drive the half hour into Boise to find anywhere equipped for pediatric patients with his strange needs (I assumed they would want to put a feeding tube back in him). Not to mention he seemed to be sleeping just fine, and wasn't any strange shade of color. So instead I had to leave the room and spend a semi-sleepless night on the couch, because I couldn't stand all of the terrible noises he was making. 

Let me tell you all: this is NOT the kind of life you want to be living with your young toddler, and it is especially not the kind of life you want to be living feeling pretty much alone. I am tired of the doctors doing practically nothing for Max, and putting us off "until next time". Their laid-back attitude about the whole situation may be them just trying to be cautious and careful, but it rubs off as cavalier and uncaring when you have to live with the problems day in and day out. I understand that they are probably doing their very best and can only come up with so many ideas, but the lack of communication that leads to delay in our treatment is hurting my son, and this momma bear is tired of watching her baby hurt over and over again. I am also tired of living 5 hours away from the only people that could offer us (or at least me) backup and mental relief. Without blabbering on and on about it, I am just really burnt out of my life situation right now. Don't ask me what needs to give or what on earth is going to happen, but something has got to change in the good news direction. Literally, only God knows what and when that is going to be, but I am so ready to reach that point and find out!!

Anyway, that's about all for this time. I'm sure that I will have some sort of update on Max after his Tuesday appointment. And hopefully my coming week off will have some more fun things for this family to do!

3 Years & 18 Months

Yup, that's how old my kiddos are now.......WHERE DID THE TIME GO??! Seriously though, I kinda can't believe it, it's crazy. Jayson's third birthday was on Saturday, and Max turned 18 months yesterday.....I love how when one has a birthday, the other has a half-birthday almost exactly the same day :]

At three years old, Jayson is 38 inches tall and weighs 35.8 pounds. I have no idea where that falls in percentages, but I'm guessing somewhere around 50th percentile....he seems pretty average compared to most kids his age. Three different height estimators have said that based on his current age, height, and weight, he is likely to be 5 feet 11 inches by the time he is all done growing. Scary to believe that some day he just might pass both Sam and I up in height--glad we've got a few years before that! He is more potty trained than not (particularly if he is motivated with some kind of prize chart), which I am SO proud of him about. Jayson's top favorite foods as of late are his special coconut bread french toast, special bread-crust pizza, chocolate milk, and smarties/sweet tarts. Gotta love the balance to his diet there....I promise he eats other healthy stuff occasionally! As a funny side note, Jayson does NOT like ice cream, apparently because it is too cold--the two times we've tried to give him some recently, he keeps asking us to give it to him hot! His favorite TV show is definitely Dora the Explorer, but it keeps him occupied and learning a few things, so I don't complain too often about watching the same episode for the millionth time. I know he's learning from good old Dora, because one time I told him to tell Daddy to stop tickling me, and he told Sam to stop alright.....but in Spanish. We may or may not have laughed hard enough to forget the tickle fight we were having. I've tried to ask Jayson several times what his favorite color is, but he always tells me whatever color my shirt is, silly boy! Jayson really cares about other people, and will always ask someone what is wrong if they are crying, which I find totally adorable. He is getting so much better at listening to what his grown-ups tell him (that's what he calls his daycare teachers, extended family, etc) and overall I couldn't be more proud of how he's growing up and learning things!

I took Jayson to his first party ever on Friday afternoon, as a Mommy and Jayson only activity, for about an hour and a half. By the way, that's the perfect time frame for a three year old, in case you were wondering. There were bounce houses, face painting, a splash pad to play in, tons of kids all ages, and lots of really great food (although Jayson couldn't eat any of it, so it was a good thing I'd packed him a few snacks). The party reminded me that Jayson is definitely more of an observer and introvert than I ever was; he wanted me to stick with him and try new things out together, but after a while became more comfortable doing things himself. Anyway, here are a few fun pictures I took at the party.

Jayson was actually really excited to get his face painted, but had no idea what he wanted. I prompted him to pick a star with his initial, because I figured you couldn't really go wrong doing something that easy. I took this picture so he could see the results after it was all done, and he was so excited! Pretty sure he cried when it came off in the bathtub Sunday morning lol.

Jayson's sultry pose. This one just made me laugh, so I had to share with you guys.

Jayson and I taking a selfie in the bounce house. By the way, it's really tricky to do when lots of kids are jumping like crazy! I was surprised to see some of me in Jayson when I looked at this picture. I feel like both my boys take a lot after Sam (which is all great cause he's pretty handsome), but it's nice to know that I made it in the gene pool mix a little bit lol. You can't really tell in this picture, but we also both share the same strange blue/green/brown eye color :]

 

At 18 months old, Max is around 31 inches tall and weighs 26.8 pounds--this kid doesn't let all of his problems keep him skinny hehe! Once again, I have no idea where that falls, but am guessing in the 50th-75th percentile. We will just have to wait until their well checks next month to know for sure though.  Max's top favorite foods are eggs, special coconut flour bread/french toast, cottage cheese, cheese sticks, ice cream......and really whatever you will give him on his highchair tray. This poor child struggles a lot with hearing the words no at mealtime, because he is STILL on a no oral liquids diet, and has that gosh darn naso-gastric tube. All of the tape required to hold it in place is honestly ripping his face to pieces after having it for 8+ weeks, it's super sad. His hysterical tantrums at meal time have become the norm (our new duplex neighbors are gonna love us!) but we try very hard to all be understanding of his struggles and not lose our patience too much. He has a follow-up swallow study on August 12th, to see if this last surgery helped improve his aspiration issues, but I fear that I already know the answer. He has made minimal at best improvements from what we can see, and that probably means he will need to get a gastric tube (surgically put directly into his stomach) and continue to be on a no oral liquids diet. I don't ask this kind of stuff very often, but......please please please pray that Max's doctors will be inspired to know how to best help him, and that we as parents will know best how to advocate for him. It's a very long haul that he and we have been through, both physically and emotionally, and some days we just don't know if we can do it any more! (Yet somehow we do, by some miracle.) We all would like nothing more than to be able to get Max to a functional point with swallowing liquids!

 

Max loves anything his big brother does (fights over toys are aplenty at my house), and those two are always trying to get into mischief together! He's a real Daddy's boy (to the point where he cries if Sam leaves his sight for more than a few seconds) but does love to give hugs and high-fives to everyone. Even at this young of an age, I see that he is going to be more extroverted than Jayson; Max just has a certain charm about him and honestly lights up a room whenever he walks....okay toddles.....in. He's getting incredibly vocal nowadays, and the amount of understandable words that come out of his mouth often astonishes me. The one word he refuses to say though is please; instead he does the baby sign for it, which is rubbing the tummy/chest area in a circular motion. We thought he was just being really weird for a while, but a few months back when my mother-in-law was here, she caught on to what he was trying to do, and now I find it rather adorable. His hair still has a reddish tint to it (found myself!) but he has dark greenish brown eyes and slightly darker-white skin like daddy does. He is growing very attached to his monkey stuffed animal and blanket, and calls his monkey "baby". It's the cutest thing ever to hear him yell "baby!" and run from across the room to his monkey, and it happens at least three times a day--lucky for me! Even though we have had a lot of ups and downs with Max in the last several months, he tries hard to be such a good boy, and I couldn't be happier when his little face lights up with a big smile. Sadly, the only picture I have of him is about a month old, but it's better than nothing I figure.

Enjoying a super giant cheese stick from 7-11. All of his cousins and brother got Slurpees, which was sad for him, until he found out he got a treat too! Looking forward to the day (hopefully) where his only dietary restriction is CSID, and he can enjoy drinks with everyone else :]

We get to go visit our cousins and Auntie Aubum/Uncle Dot (Jayson's pet names for Autumn and Brett haha) this upcoming weekend, definitely getting excited for that! I am going to try hard to remember to take some pictures, so I can post about it. 

P.S. If you think that Dot is a strange name for Brett, Jayson used to call him Uncle Butt--his own interpretation of how to say Brett--I'm willing to bet he prefers Dot haha!

Fun Pictures

I've (finally) been taking some pictures as of late, and thought I'd slap a few of them up on here for all of your guys' enjoyment :]

This was on the 4th of July (as I'm sure you guessed), right before we went to the Layton Parade. Max stayed home with Daddy, and consequently wasn't dressed when we took this picture, so that's why he's not in it. It's too bad too, because this is probably the cutest picture we got of all the cousins during their two weeks down here. Anyway, Jayson and I had a fantastic time at the parade--I just love that he's getting old enough for us to go and do fun things together!

Another slightly less flattering of everyone picture, taken on the last day everyone was together. Had to put it up though, because I wanted one of all seven kiddos. I just love how excited Max and Jayson were haha.

I know you can't really tell because the lettering is lime green, and because Jayson is covering up the writing on his shirt, but their t-shirts say "My brother is the best" and I just love it! I know they would agree with the statement, because every day when we go to pick them up from daycare, and they see each other for the first time in several hours, they share a big giant hug :] The other thing I love about these shirts is that they were fairly cheap up at the Park City outlet Carter's store. Jayson recently hit a growth spurt and has desperately needed almost all new clothing, so I got to enjoy shopping up at the outlets with my sister during my last week off. I seriously just want to go back and blow way more money, because I had such a good time and the clothes are so cute for the kids!

 

Since I went back to work this week (the down side of 7 off is having 7 on again lol), Sam tried to keep the boys occupied and quiet. That often means doing stuff outside of the house while I try and sleep. I have to say, Sam is GREAT at doing this, and I really really really appreciate it. This Saturday the little boys got haircuts (thank GOODNESS because Jayson was really starting to look crazy, as you can see in the above picture) and went to the zoo. Despite the fact that no one looks very thrilled in this selfie style pic, I am told that the boys really enjoyed riding the train for the first time. 

 

Apparently Jayson insisted on taking a picture while sitting on the lion statue, funny kid. I told Sam he was very brave for letting Max sit on the lion unassisted. BTW, the leash thingy that Max is wearing has become his absolute favorite stuffed animal of sorts (the leash part can come off in case you were wondering). He carries it around everywhere and calls it "Baby". It almost always cracks me up--I love to hear him say words lately, because his little voice is so different after surgery.

And last but not least is this little gem. As I type, my boys are probably passed out asleep like this. Max chooses to sleep on the floor pretty much every night (even if we put him back in bed)! Jayson consequently decides that it's ok to sleep in Max's bed. Tonight he also decided it would be okay to put on a pair of jeans to sleep, instead of his pajama pants. Whatever right? Love those crazy boys though to pieces :]

Family Facts

Time to start blogging again! Quick little update on the family :]

Figured I might as well start with the littlest member of the family (Sam was lucky to get in the picture too lol). Love my Maxwell to pieces, but man, he's sure given us a lot of trouble lately! To make an incredibly long story short about Max, since I last blogged:

• We have become best buddies with our ENT doctor at Primary Children's. We've quite possibly given Dr. Grimmer WAY more business than any other family to grace that clinic, between our two boys, in these past two years! 
• We've been through two different (and miserably failed) swallow studies in February and June, which showed us that Max has really bad aspiration issues. Like bad enough that he should have had pneumonia and/or sepsis, and be consequently hospitalized. We count our blessings every day that he's avoided that.
• During our June swallow study, they decided the thickened liquid feeds by mouth weren't helping, so he got a feeding tube for all liquids (he still gets to eat anything thicker than pudding texture by mouth). It was definitely a LONG first week weaning him off the bottle, and learning how/when to tube feed.
• Max was seen by a team of three specialists from the ENT, Pulmonolgy, and GI departments. They decided to do an endoscopy and check out the anatomy in his throat, along with a few other diagnostic tests. Everything checked out pretty well, but they found that he has a laryngeal cleft. Essentially, this is an extra valley of space between your voice box and esophagus that shouldn't exist, allowing food/liquids to go down the wrong way. We thought when they filled the space with a gel block that we would see miraculous improvements, that we had our fix it all answer. 
• Unfortunately, Max still failed his follow up gel block swallow study, but the doctor wanted to try and close his cleft surgically (aka with stitches) due to the small improvements we noticed before the gel block dissolved. He also wanted Max to have a brain MRI just to make sure that there was no funny business going on in his head (as in brain tumor or a weird malformation).
• Last Friday he went under general anesthesia for his MRI and got a clean bill of health on his brain, thank goodness! And just yesterday afternoon, his doctor went in and closed up the laryngeal cleft. The picture above is of Max enjoying his first post-surgery meal with Daddy. And boy did he enjoy it--he cried when all the food was gone! He's such a big eater, and a boy boy overall (almost 26 pounds and around 32 inches)!
• At the end of this month, we go back for a third (and hopefully final) swallow study to evaluate if closing the laryngeal cleft helped Max out at all. If not, we are probably looking at a more permanent stomach feeding tube, and having to hope that one day he will mature out of his swallow issues. We are definitely crossing our fingers for the best though; that he will show progress and improvement with swallowing liquids. I am looking forward to the day when he can join his daycare friends in drinking from a sippy cup!

Other than his swallowing issues, Max is a happy, smiley 17 month old. Every day when we pick him up from daycare, his teachers just rave about what a sweet little guy he is. He's definitely got a bit of my fiery redheaded personality in him (probably because he has a little red in his hair too!) but overall he's just my sweet baby, and I wouldn't trade him for the world!

 

Next up is Jayson; I almost feel like I can't call him my little boy anymore! He is going to be THREE at the end of this month, and I am pretty much in shock about it. Jayson definitely says the funniest things lately, and talks like there is no tomorrow. The older he gets, the more his personality shines out. I am finding that he is more like me than I ever realized. I guess I always assumed that because I had boys, they would be little carbon copies of their dad. While this is true in a lot of ways, I think that Jayson might be wired to think more like I do. He loves structure and organization to his days, is really motivated by a goal, and is ridiculously stubborn in doing things "all by myself".  However, I will say, he is a lot like his dad in the fact that if thrown into a crowded/noisy room, he would rather observe people than be the center of attention. Oh and they both definitely love cooking. Jayson is like both of us in the sense that he definitely has an aptitude for music. And he is like neither of us in the sense that he seems to have an aptitude for gymnastics. No joke, this kid can already do somersaults, loves to walk the low balance beam at daycare, and frequently jumps from the last four stairs just to scare the heck out of me. So if anyone wants to pay for Jayson to take a gymnastic class once a week after his third birthday, just hit me up now lol. I love this not-so-little man to death, and am looking forward to throwing him a birthday party in the near future (quite hopefully)!

Here's a picture of my two furry children that I snapped recently. Can I just tell you how much I love having Gidgett and Tonka as part of our family? I know my allergies don't love having cats around, and I don't always love to clean the litter box or vacuum every day because of the fur.....but other than that I 100% love having kitties! There is nothing more soothing to me than to just sit down with a cat in your lap and get to pet them. Admittedly, Gidgett doesn't really love her whole body being petted, but Tonka will roll over on his stomach and let me give him a belly rub! Tonka is the cat that will follow you around everywhere, and always tries to sleep on my head at night. Gidgett is the cat that prefers to watch you from afar, but loves to run around and play with you. Sometimes I am surprised that we have only had the cats for six months, because I can't hardly remember life without them standing right by the door when we come home.

And just for kicks you can enjoy this picture I took of Sam and I on our fourth anniversary, back in May. Not a whole lot new between the two of us lately, just mainly trying to stay afloat and take care of the kids. Same old same old :] My only big change (besides getting a haircut in March) was switching work schedules. I used to work 4 10 hour days a week: some morning shifts and some afternoon shifts, but never on a predictable schedule. A chance for me to do 7 on/7 off graveyard in blood bank and hematology opened up, and I thought just for kicks I'd give it a go. There are definitely pros and cons to the scheduling of it, but overall I think it's something I prefer doing. Plus it pays slightly better to work at night, and since we are swimming in Maxwell medical bills, any little bit helps!

So there you have it. We are alive, and always on the go! Stay tuned for more Slaugh family fun in the near future :]