Ok, I’ve had a number of comments about how out of date our
blog is. Yes, it is. I agree.
So I’m making an effort to provide an update on where we are
in our lives.
As a family, we’re doing great!! This winter has been long but fast. I can’t believe I’m eyeing up the seeds for spring
planting but at the same time, spring can’t get here fast enough. That said, I recognize that every single day
that goes by, my girls grow up. It doesn’t
matter how many times you savour the moment, stop to smell the roses…time goes
by and it goes by too quickly.
Payton continues, health wise, to be doing great. While she did have a bout of pneumonia this
winter, a little bit of asthma and reflux that started in early December, she’s
holding her own and these are health issues that are very manageable and I’m
very thankful that her current issues are so minor. We did see a respiratologist (or however you
spell it) at Children’s hospital and he’s placed her on an inhaler for the
remainder of the winter to minimize potential pneumonia (the inhaler hopefully
will keep her lungs ‘open’ so she can clear them when sick and prevent the
build-up of fluid, aka pneumonia). She
was also placed on anti reflux medication.
Her reflux only presents at night (around 2 am) when she starts
coughing. Prior to her medication I
could often smell that bile smell, knowing that likely she was dealing with
reflux. The medication hasn’t completely
prevented incidents but I no longer smell the bile and her incidents are less
severe/often. We are lucky because even
without meds the only time it occurs is at night. We’re hopefull she’ll grow out of it fairly
soon.
Developmentally she’s doing very well. She had her 1.5 y check-up/follow-up with the
NICU in mid February and they were very pleased with her development. They even had to go and ‘pull out the more
advanced toys” for her. We notice this
advanced development at home too but in different ways. Now that she’s able to balance on the back of
the couch (NOT encouraged by any means) and do random summersaults (very well I
may add, sometimes even launching herself off the couch/bed doing so…again, not
encouraged) and crawling up onto chairs, tables etc. All this, aside from the couch surfing, Livy
did not do so we’re in new territory with this one.
Her vocabulary is growing heaps and each day we get a new
word. She’s learning her ABC’s and for
every letter of the alphabet she will repeat a word starting with that
letter. E is for… “elephant”, M is for…”monkey”,
etc.
Livy is…well, Livy.
She is growing so fast. Having a
little sister brings out the worst and the best in her…in the same motion she
will go from kissing Payton to bonking her on the head. She’s almost swimming independently and I
wish we could/would be able to take her to the pool more often. I’ve tried to enrol her in lessons but when I
look, they are ALWAYS full and though I place us on the waiting lists, we don’t
seem to advance into a time slot EVER!!
So we go sporadically and THANK GOODNESS she has a good memory.
Skating this winter didn’t take off much (though we
tried). The time slot for family skate
is right around when Livy starts to get grumpy and thus its been a bit tiresome
arguing with a 3 year old who is frustrated when she can’t do something. This has been something I’ve begun to notice
with Livy. If she can’t do something ‘well’ then she doesn’t want to do it. We’re seeing it with her learning to ride her
pedal bike (sans training wheels). She
would much rather rip around on her runner bike than brave the pedal bike (even
though she has successfully ridden the pedal bike). She likes her comfort zone play. So I’m trying to buck the trend and push her
to try new, hard things and not let her resort back to the ‘easy way’ all the
time.
Dwayne and I are doing well.
We’re both busy trying to stay active, training for some events once the
nice weather rolls around. We’re both
signed up for a 21km cross country run and the Test of Metal thus far. Dwayne will likely start to add copious
biking events to his schedule while I will debate the local triathlon and
likely commit (or not) around April. Training for the 21 km run should make the
Tri easy…and since running is my weak part (not that I’m a fast swimmer etc its
just easy compared to the run) it may be that large amounts of running I’m
currently doing will make it all seem easy
(ha ha, at least that’s the dream).
March is a busy month for us (as it always is) and Dwayne
and I head to Toronto this weekend for our annual work conference. This year we have both Grandma Val and
Grandma Helen in Squamish to help us out.
It should be interesting… The good news is each year it gets easier with
the girls so by next year we should only need 1 Grandma to watch them :).
At the end of March we’ll be taking a “hopefully” warm
holiday. It will be our first trip to Hawaii and Dwayne and I are hoping to use
it as our biking season kick start. My
parents are coming with us and while I only need 1.5-2 hrs max each day on the bike
(if that) having my parents there will allow Dwayne a few long days in the
saddle, something I know he’s looking forward to.
I have a ton of pics sitting on the camera and I will try to
get them on the blog. At a minimum I’ll
try to include some of the photos we took on the boys’ birthday (Nov 7th)
the last day I posted an update.
