February Update on the Baby

Sorry I have not written in a while. Things have been very busy after leaving the hospital back in December. We have pretty much just stayed at home and not gone anywhere letting Aimee recover. I am happy to report that she is doing wonderful. Her stiches are fading, hair is growing back beautifully and she is growing like a weed. She is now 14 lbs, 5 oz without the weight of the growth. She is so much more active and awake now. We have had a therapist working with Beth to increase her motor skills and development. She has had a minor set back in the past few weeks. Starting in late January, she developed a habit of straining all of her muscles very hard which made her legs and arms and back rigid and tight. For the first couple of days we thought she was having digestive problems because we started her on solid food at about the same time. She will work anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours straining and working herself into a frenzy. Sometimes, she works so hard that she raises her own temperature once even up to 101.6. We have taken her to Seattle Children's ER twice and an outpatient visit once to try to find the cause for this. Fortunetly, they don't think it is anything related to the shunt. 2 CT scans and 3 full body X-rays have been done in the past two weeks and her shunt is working perfectly. This led the doctors to believe she might be having seizures. We went into the hospital again at 3 am on Thursday Feb 7th and were admitted. They did a lot of different cultures for possible infection, re-ran CTs and X-rays and then did an EEG (Electroencephalography) which measured her brain waves to detect any seizures. I am happy to report they saw no seizure activity or infections at all. While this is of course good news, it still leaves us with questioning what really is going on. We were released from the hospital late Friday evening and are just at home monitoring the situation. We think it could be any number of things including maybe teething. Or just a lot of bubbles in her system. Because she has a cleft palate she swallows a LOT of air when eating. (Trust me on this - her X-rays shows large amounts of air in her system). Just be praying whatever is going on that it will stop soon cause it sometimes scares mom and dad. Other than that though she is doing so great. Talk to you later.