ACH Check Up

I can't believe it has been four months since we were last at Children's Hospital in Little Rock for Samuel's check-up.  Not long ago, I would have flipped at the thought of being 'left alone' for such a long stretch of time.  Now I wanted to ask, "Can we stretch it out a little longer?"

The 4.5 hour drive to Little Rock is hard for this 18 month old kid of mine.  Especially now that he's so active.  We have the option of being seen at a satellite clinic nearby (only a 20 minute drive from our house), but I would rather Samuel be seen by the specialists at Little Rock, who can quickly address a problem if one presents itself.



Not a good picture, but you can see that he doesn't appreciate being confined.


The actual appointment was fairly uneventful.  The scale weighed him at 20 lbs (which made me want to cry) but they didn't seem to mind too much.  Overall, he is gaining about 6 grams a day (6 paperclips if you don't know how much a gram weighs) instead of the recommended 8-10.  But height-for-weight he is in the 70th percentile...very proportionate.



He was exhausted after the long trip and all of the waiting.


I was expecting to be scolded about having weened him off his medicines...which I did without asking 'permission.'  We had stopped giving him one steroid inhaler and his Prevacid dosage.  Amazingly though, the medical staff congratulated us!  They even gave us permission to begin weening him off his nasal spray in November.  After that point, he will only need his Miralax and multivitamin (which won't change until he begins to eat more table food.)

Speaking of eating, they are going to do a feeding study for Samuel (at my request!)  I'm not excited about having to drive to Little Rock again, but I'm so excited for their speech therapists to assess his eating.  It's about time we figure out what is going on and why we aren't making much progress.

I'll have to make an appointment with the pediatric dentist in the coming days, but other than those two appointments, we are just going to keep truckin' along.

Oh....and since I mentioned trucks....

If you can't tell, that's my pantless son waving 'bye' to an 18 wheeler when we took a quick pit stop.  (I was inside while this occurred.)  When I discovered the above situation, the conversation went:

Me:  Why is Samuel not wearing pants?
Michael:  Because we are getting right back in the car again and he's going to get hot in his carseat.
Me:  So you put his shoes on, left his pants off, and allowed him to walk through a parking lot waving goodbye to a semi?
Michael:  Yup.
Me:  Geez....it's people like you that give us Arkansans a bad name.  And you're not even from Arkansas! You're not even from the US!  Gimme back my kid!


What a laugh....I love this sweet family of mine!