Three big holidays (at least in our house) have gone by since I updated this blog! Crazy. First was St. Patrick's day. A naughty leprechaun came to our house and made a big mess the day before! He turned the chairs over, left green crepe paper everywhere, turned the toilet water green, and left footprints all over the kitchen table. He also left Will a little pail of treasure for not trying to catch him. :)
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Then came Easter. Will loved easter. He's a real candy fanatic, and he'll tell you so himself in those exact words. Ben could care less of course - he's down to strictly water by mouth. And it has to be in a clear glass with no ice cubes. He's a demanding little thing! We didn't do anything super special, but the easter bunny did come and leave baskets, and we had an easter egg hunt in the jungle in our backyard. There are a lot of good hiding places there. Will had so much fun we had easter egg hunts every day for about a week.
And then of course it was Will's birthday! He had a fun little party with a few of his friends. All of his friends were girls, so I wanted to avoid a superhero party. So we ended up having a fish party. He had a shark cake and we hung fish and blue streamers from the ceiling to make it feel like we were underwater. The kids got paper scuba masks that had blue film to make everything look blue and they had a great time with those.
Will is 40 pounds now and he's a talking machine. He starts talking when he wakes up in the morning and he talks himself to sleep every night. In fact he's talking right now as I write this post. He's also stopped taking his naps. So it's 12 hours of talking, all day every day. Going out to teach is a real relief these days! LOL I still have 9 students who have stuck with me through all the chaos of my schedule this year, bless their hearts. I'm an itinerant teacher at the moment so I can't teach many students in one day, so I'm teaching 3 or 4 afternoons a week. It's a nice break from being mommmy. Brian is still doing well at his job. Things are a little complicated there right now because we found out the reason why the guy before him left the position was that it was enough work for two people. (Great to know, right??) But he's working to try and delegate some responsibilities so he can actually do a good job and not have to work 60 hours a week.
Ben had a G-tube placed in February and it was not a fun surgery. We had three days in the hospital and about 6 weeks of vomiting until he finally settled down. We've started feeding him slowly overnight and just a little during the day. At first that didn't really help and he was throwing up once or twice every night. But as of today it's been 5 days since he threw up - keep your fingers crossed! His weight has yo-yoed from 18 pounds 2 oz up to 20 pounds, back down to 19 pounds, and now he's back up to 20. But since he's stopped vomiting I'm really hopeful that we're on a schedule that works for his tummy. He's started crawling now! We have some cute little leg braces that we're using to practice standing, and he has his first pair of glasses as well. When he has all his gear on he's quite the sight! LOL But we can't keep the glasses on him for more than 15 seconds at a time, so I can't get a good picture of him in them. He'll get used to them eventually. We saw his cardiologist a couple of weeks ago and they said his valves are functioning just fine and his aortic arch actually looks better! So things are looking great for Ben right now.
