Little Postcards from "Holland": I'm back...

...Well, maybe. I knew it had been a while since I last blogged but I had no idea it had been 3 months. I sort of felt like there really wasn't much to write about. We have been trudging along through everyday life. Nothing new or excited has really happened. But, if I take some of the smaller things and put them together, then maybe I would have at least one good post in me. So here is what's been going on.

The holidays went by in a rather blur. Tommy and I hosted both Thanksgiving and Christmas at our house. While it's nice to not have to travel, there is a different difficulty in having everyone at your house. But we had a great time. Thanksgiving seemed to go by pretty easy. We had dinner instead of lunch and since we did a lot of preparations the night before, we didn't really spend our entire day cooking on Thanksgiving day. Christmas, however, was a different story. We had basically the same menu, with a few exceptions, but I spent the entire day in the kitchen, rushing to get it all together to eat at 5:00. I don't know what happened. And, if it wouldn't have been for our neighbors letting us use their oven and their refrigerator and a few of their dining room chairs, I don't know if we would have made it. It's great to have neighbors like that. Have I mentioned before how much we love them? I'm pretty sure I have. The best part of the holidays is we all managed to stay healthy. No illnesses through the whole month of December may be a record for us.

New Year's Eve was rather uneventful. We did get to spend some time with several of our good friends. Each year, one family hosts a New Year's Eve party at their house. Since it includes kids, we start at 5:00. We left around 8:00 to get home before John's nurse gets here and we were all in bed asleep well before midnight. We are some real party animals at our house.

Since the start of the year, John has had several doctors appointments. They normally are more spread out, but somehow we managed to schedule 3 appointments in January and he has already had one in February with another coming up.

The first appointment was with the ENT. I mentioned to her that he seems to have this constant nasal congestion and every now and then it flares up to an infection. She put him on Singulair allergy medicine every day, along with a nasal spray. We have been hoping this would keep the congestion under control and keep him from getting any kind of sinus infections. However, he spent two days home this week with congestion. He got an antibiotic from the doctor on Monday and was finally able to go back to school on Wednesday. Poor little guy was just wiped out from not feeling well and has slept so much since Sunday.

The next appointment was with Pulmonology and there was nothing new to add. We did schedule another sleep study for this summer. Then we saw our Neurologist/sleep doctor. She decided that since John's sleep seems to be under control, she doesn't need to see him any more, unless he starts having problems with either sleep or seizures. So we can now cross one specialist off of our list that we see regularly.

Yesterday was a rather exciting appointment, well maybe it depends on your definition of exciting. We saw our PM&R (Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation) doctor. She basically follows all of his development progress. She recommends therapies for John as well as writes prescriptions for any equipment he might need. She was very pleased with his progress. She thought that we should get a different kind of brace for his feet. Instead of the tall kind of brace that goes most of the way up his lower leg, she thinks that short braces that just go up to his ankle would be sufficient. We are hoping that this will make it easier for him to pick up his feet when he walks. The other braces are so heavy and bulky, that he seems to have a little more difficult time picking his feet up off the floor when he is wearing them. But the exciting part of this appointment was that she suggested we start trying to potty train John. This thought has crossed my mind, but I just never have been convinced that he could handle it. Her suggestion was that we take him to sit on the potty every two hours and that we should start changing his diaper only in the bathroom so he can correlate that is what he is supposed to do in that room.

**Warning** this next paragraph talks about using the potty so if you don't want to read about it, you can stop now.

When he came home from school yesterday, I decided to try putting him on the potty. Sitting him on the potty is not an easy thing to do. First of all, he thinks it's HILARIOUS. Once I get him on it, he starts trying to grab the shower curtain and anything else he can get his hands on. Then when he realizes that I'm not going to let him, he puts his hands on the side of the seat and pushes his bottom up off the seat. Then sometimes he leans his head over and lays it against me. But the whole time he is laughing. The funny thing is, the very first time I sat him on it, he actually went. It was just a little bit, but he did go. When he was finished, I put a diaper back on him and then he promptly wet it. Of course he is not going to make it easy. I tried one more time last night and again this morning, and he didn't go either time. But we'll keep at it. His teachers are also going to work on it at school. We've decided that it will be easier if he is wearing pull ups, so we are going to start using those during the day. Today I went to Target and bought him a smaller seat to put on the potty and a couple packs of pull ups. The problem with pull ups is that they aren't generally designed for kids John's size. So the regular ones are too small. But they have some called Good Nites that are designed for older kids who have trouble wetting the bed. So we will just have to use those. This is going to be an interesting adventure. I don't know if he'll ever learn to go to the bathroom when he needs to. It might just be that we train him to go at certain times of the day. But either way, I'll take it. I'm glad to have a friend that is going through the same thing, that I can talk to and get advice about it. It sure makes this journey easier when you have someone going through it along side of you that understands how difficult it can be and can speak the same language.

I'll end this post with a few pictures to show you what we've been up to lately.