No more milk...

Friday, February 26
So, milk is definitely out of the question for the time being. Every time Faith has any significant amount of milk (even just the 1-2 oz she gets when practicing drinking), she projectile vomits! Yogurt is ok, which is good news, because she loves it, and the nutritionist said cheese should still be fine. I'm planning to introduce soft cheese sticks as finger food pretty soon, so I was glad to hear that, too.
Speaking of finger food, Faith is back to eating real solids! I've been making these Oatmeal Banana Drop cookies for the kids, because I'm trying to eliminate excess sugar in snacks and they don't have any sugar added, and she LOVES them. We've also added old-fashioned cooked oatmeal to her regular food, cream of wheat, and we've tried brown rice too for some extra texture for her to work on. She's handling crackers and those boring little dissolvable puffs again, too, and even holding and eating chunks of banana and avocado!
She is completely cordless during the day; we are only hooking her up for her g-tube feeds overnight now and giving her one full 500mL bag of formula while she sleeps. We've been doing this for a month now, and yesterday when the nutritionist was here we weighed Faith, and she hadn't gained any weight, but she did maintain, which the nutritionist was super happy with, considering she's getting WAY less calories than she was when she was first starting to eat again and still hooked up to continuous feeds at around 50 mL/hr most of the day, and she's gotten super active and is burning more too. Now if only she could figure out the drinking thing, we'd be so close to getting rid of the tube!!
Still not really any more progress with crawling... but we've been too nice and haven't made her wear the torture device lately. She has started pushing herself backwards more when she tries to crawl, which the OT says is really good and is an important step to learning to move forwards. She's also signing "thank you", "all done", "more", "love you", "hat", and probably a couple of others I can't think of right now, as well as starting to try and actually verbalize some of those words, and she can shake her head "yes" or "no" at times when it would actually make sense for her to do that. All in all, she is doing awesome! I think she is waiting to crawl for us to get some baby-proofing done, because even with her limited mobility so far, she gets into EVERYTHING! Her favorite activity has progressed from pulling all the shoes off the rack by the door to now pulling everything out of my purse, unzipping my wallet, and scattering its contents all around the living room. Why do we want her to crawl again?!
Still no job for Dave, although he has put in applications for some good ones. Please continue to pray that something will come through soon on that front!

Long time, no post!

Tuesday, February 9
Happy Birthday to Nathan, 4 years old today!
Faith is doing great, getting huge and doing more and more new things every day. I apologize for not being more regular with posts... but with Faith things are pretty much "no news is good news". It has been pretty much more of the same.
She was sick over Thanksgiving, and pretty much all of the progress she had made with feeds was un-done at that point. She had been doing awesome with eating, and would even eat 3+ pancakes in one sitting! Now she is doing well with baby food consistency things, but no chunks, no crackers, and definitely no pancakes. Still figuring out the drinking thing... she doesn't really understand sucking to drink at all, but will drink from a straw cup that we can squeeze to make the liquid go up the straw, and will drink from an open cup with our help. Milk is questionable at this point, she tolerates it fine, but gets hives anywhere it touches her skin. Weird, especially since I've been giving it to her to practice drinking pretty much since her birthday... I've never tried giving her formula to drink, it smells so nasty I wouldn't drink it, so it doesn't feel right making her drink it.
She is a master roller- that's how she gets around and she is very fast and efficient with it. She gets into everything, and I'm constantly questioning whether I actually want her to crawl or walk... she's really quiet too, so I never know she's gotten into something until she's made a big mess! She is obsessed with shoes... Dave and I have joked that we're not going to buy her presents anymore, we're just going to buy her shoes in every size she'll ever need, because that will make her just as happy as any gift we could buy her! I have made her a "torture device" to try and help her crawl, basically it's a T made from PVC pipe and I use a long strip of fleece to tie it to her back, which keeps her from being able to roll over. Because she's so motivated to move, I figured that if I could keep her from rolling, she'd start crawling just to be able to move. She doesn't appreciate it much, but she is making steps towards figuring out the crawling thing.
Dave got home to stay last Thursday. We are still adjusting to having him here all the time, and probably as soon as we get adjusted he will find a job and start working, and we'll have to re-adjust all over again. It's always something :) We are incredibly thankful to all be together finally and are enjoying every minute.
Please continue to think of us, pray that Dave will find a job soon, that Faith will be able to eat and drink normally and catch up with her gross motor skills, and continue to read about and pray for all of Faith's friends and their families, too!