Well, I guess it’s time for me to start doing some random
posts about the things we’ve been up to lately! These will all be out of order,
but I will try and get caught up! Today’s post will be about our recent trip to
visit family in Kentucky for the 4th of July.
We had a really great trip visiting John’s family. The kids
always especially love spending time with all their cousins down there! The kids have 8 cousins there all around their age! This
time we were lucky enough to be able to spend an entire week! The weather was
pretty awful, but thankfully we were able to still have a great trip.
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| Callie, Ethan, and cousin Wesley watching a movie |
We have a new fireworks business (Midnight Madness). This
year was the first for it and we only sold there in Kentucky (hence the reason
for the trip). Callie loves that John is involved in this! She loves fireworks
and had a blast all week lighting things off! Ethan on the other hand hates the
noise of fireworks (surprise surprise). But thankfully the gun headphones did a
great job and he was finally able to enjoy the shows and playing around with
all the fun stuff! He especially loves the lanterns! He would get so
excited every time we went to light one off!
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| lighting off Ethan's heart lantern |
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| some of the fireworks for sale |
We also had a big celebration with their church. There was a
ton of great food, fun people to visit with, and inflatables for the kids. We
topped it off with a great fireworks show (put on by Midnight Madness of
course)!
J
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| Ethan resting in the bounce house |
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| Callie with some cousins and friends |
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| Ethan, Callie, and Wesley waiting for the fireworks |
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| Ethan and Callie with sparklers |
Near the end of our visit, a tiny kitten strolled its way up
to a bonfire we were at. The neighbor threatened to kill it if it was still on
his property in the morning. We noticed it had something wrong with its eye, so
we left it outside to hopefully go back to where it came from. By morning
though, the kitten was still hanging around. We didn’t want anything tragic to
happen to it (*cough* the neighbor), so we decided to take it. By morning his eye was looking pretty
rough, so we scheduled an emergency trip to the local vet and took him in. The
vet checked him out, prescribed some antibiotics, and sent us on our way. He
was severely malnourished (weighed only 1 pound!), had an eye infection, and
upper respiratory infection. We loved him and cared for him the best that we
could, but unfortunately about 2 miles into our trip back home poor little
Dorito died. L
Callie was devastated. Ethan was mainly upset that we didn’t show him the dead
cat before throwing him out. We had to go retrieve Dorito in his box to show
Ethan the body. He's under the impression that Dorito will be reunited with "Blue Puppy" (the stuffed dog he accidentally left at a doctor office and they threw away). Ethan's happy that Dorito and Blue Puppy will be at the dump together. Weird. Very weird. Needless to say, we are
now being bombarded with requests for a new pet. *sigh* Well, birthdays are
fast approaching…
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| Callie and Dorito |
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| Ethan and Dorito |
We had a safe trip back home and are somewhat back in our
routine.
Onto the medical stuff.
Ethan still has pneumonia. He’s doing amazingly well with it
– I can’t believe how “normal” he is even with his lungs the way they are. He’s
still doing all the same things he normally does. Granted, a majority of his
time is spent sitting playing legos or coloring so that helps! We have a
recheck for his pneumonia on Tuesday. After that we’ll return to cardiology to
figure out the next step. They are waiting for his lung xrays to see what’s
going on. Obviously, we can’t really move forward with another heart procedure
until his lungs are clear. Hopefully the doctor will find that they’ve improved
at this next appointment! On August 1st we go to pulmonology to see
if they can come up with a new idea to help his lungs. The pediatrician is
discouraged that all the steroids, antibiotics, and breathing treatments aren’t
working.
His neuropsychology results came in the mail yesterday. They
were disheartening. Apparently Ethan didn’t cooperate as well as I had hoped –
even though I did kind of expect it. This affected his scores. We’ll end up having to
retest later when he can pay attention a bit more. He just still wouldn’t focus
and pay attention well enough to get accurate readings. They noted that this
will be a major problem in school. I’ll have to schedule another meeting with
his school to go over this and finish up plans for kindergarten. Basically, I’m
thinking we’ll probably go with the original plan for attending this kindergarten. If he’s
struggling too much or having problems, then we’ll decide if we need to switch
to a Goddard school or something with more one-on-one, hands-on types of
teaching methods. The test results say he’ll need frequent breaks, limited
distractions, and mastery of each skill before moving onto the next to avoid
frustration. His language is also a huge barrier (and was during the testing).
Ethan gets extremely frustrated when asked to repeat himself. I guess he’s just
sick of constantly trying to get his words right and nobody understanding him. L
After one or two times trying to repeat himself, he’ll just give up and say “Never
mind!” I have a feeling that we’re going to have to attend additional speech
therapy outside of his school. I’m not sure what they’re providing will be
enough for him. Hopefully I’m wrong, but we’ll see. They also warned that he's at risk for depression and anxiety. He definitely has a lot of anxiety, but hopefully that's something that we can work out easily. :/
I also had a procedure done in the middle of June. I found
out I had something called May-Thurners disease. My left iliac vein was
severely compressed by an artery in my pelvis. It’s apparently what has been
causing my blood clots for the past ten years! I’m so glad we’ve finally
figured it out! I had two stents placed in my iliac vein to open up blood flow.
I can already tell a difference in my leg! The healing went a lot slower than I
expected. I don’t know how Ethan does this! I had major bruising and swelling in
my groin for 3 weeks! I also had a lot of pain for the first 1.5-2 weeks that I
didn’t expect. Ethan’s up playing normally the next day after his caths, so I
definitely didn’t expect mine to be any different. Boy, was I wrong. That boy
is tough! Thankfully I’m doing SO much better now. I’m back to my normal
routine and my bruising is almost completely gone now! I have six months of blood
thinners to take, then I should be done with those for life!
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| Me recovering from the cath |
That’s enough for now! Please keep us in your prayers. There
will be a lot of appointments coming up soon that need to go well. I know we
were supposed to have his cath this past spring and open heart in the winter,
but now I’m not exactly sure what the plan is. I should find all that out at
our next cardio appointment soon. I also will be playing catch up more, so another post with our summer outings will be coming soon! :)
