Marching, Producing, and Getting help

Sorry that this update hasn't come sooner. We have some good news, some not so good, and some fun. We are excited to announce that Evan is going to be the St. Luke's team ambassador for the March of Dimes March for babies walk! The walk is this April 25, and we're hoping for a nice day. The March of Dimes helped fund the research that developed several things like the surfactant used for Evan's lungs that saved his life. They were also involved in discovering how important folic acid is to preventing nervous system abnormalities, which has lead to the current Folic acid doses in all prenatal vitamins. I could go on for quite awhile about all of the stuff the march of dimes does to work for healthy babies. Feel free to check out their website http://www.marchofdimes.com/ if you'd like to know more. If you'd like to sponsor us for the walk you can do so at http://www.marchforbabies.org/BeckyandStephan

Stephan has been very busy lately working on a finalized product, packaging, and a functioning web page to sell his nursing pads and hot packs. We are very excited to have packaging, a product, a working web page (still need to finalize it, and beautify it), for Evan's Dots. We'd love for everyone to check it out at http://www.evansdots.com/

And of course our son is always a great topic. He never fails to amaze me, so happy and full of life. Learning new stuff everyday. About 3 weeks ago Stephan and I took away Evan's exersaucer, and walker to encourage better floor time skills which are behind due to his lack of floor time and tummy surgeries. He is now pushing himself backwards around the floor in what Stephan calls "the comando push" and getting up onto all fours, and rocking. We don't think it will be long before he's crawling!

He LOVES to walk and his balance is getting much better, he walks all over the place holding onto just our fingers, and drives us to where he wants to go. He understands patty cake and will start to play it just off of us saying Patty cake, he does the motion for rolling it sporadically, but that's a tough motion! He will say num num and smack his lips when hungry. Can also say mom, dad-e, and says Hi while waving to people, including himself in the mirror. He fights going down for naps.....gotta see what's happening! I had to give him another hair cut because it's growing that fast and he was just looking a bit shaggy, tried to leave him a bit of his mow hawk though, because he's always had it, and his other hair just hasn't caught up with that top stuff yet.

The not so fun news we have is that Evan is going to be admitted to Minneapolis Children's again. Stephan and I have been working on eating difficulties with Evan for a LONG time now, and it's definitely been more often than not where we've had a baby puking more than what we'd like. It's been going on so long it became our normal, always fighting to try to figure out what is in his diet upsetting his stomach, and trying to get all of the food into him that he needs. Most recently in January he was puking WAY more than his normal, and we finally figured out the formula we were adding to my breast milk for more calories was causing him to puke. Anyway, it's a long complicated story that ends with us not realizing how bad Evan was getting, .....he hasn't gained any weight since January 13th. We were concerned, and trying our hardest to get him to gain weight, but not as worried as we needed to be, partly because he looks SO good, partly because we thought this is how it is....we just have a puky baby....like I said it became our normal, ....he's been puking to varying degrees since the end of June last year. We feel like something is causing the puking, because it has gone away entirely for bursts here and there. It has been getting harder and harder to control his puking with diet changes, and recently it dawned on us that maybe this is more than food allergies, and something else is going on here. Anyway, lack of weight gain can lead to permanent mental delays, and we DON'T want that. Evan had labs drawn today, everything was normal except his albumin is low (a sign of malnutrition). Stephan and I have definitely reached a point where we don't know what to do anymore. We're hopeful we can get some answers from the specialists in the cities. One place we're hoping gets looked into is Evan's kidneys, his urologist has always told us to watch for colic type behaviors, poor eating, and if he was feeling crummy and we didn't know why, that we should let him know. We probably should have seen him about this a long time ago....but hindsight is always 20/20 right.

Thanks for checking in with us, enjoy the pictures and videos!