Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Winter 2013 Update



Ok, I’ve had a number of comments about how out of date our blog is.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.