I hope everyone is enjoying fall! I am excited that the weather is starting to feel more like fall now :) Things have settled into a nice routine now that school has started. Rodi misses the kids while they are at school but we are keeping her very busy!Rodi goes to play with her cousins two mornings a week so that she is getting to socialize with kids her age while her siblings are at school all day. She also started speech therapy in September and LOVES it! On speech day she asks me constantly if it is time to go. She says "Mom, lets go learn some words!" She is making great progress. We are also doing some homeschooling with her. She is learning a lot faster than I had anticipated. We started at the very basics, colors, shapes, animals and animal sounds, sorting things by color, cutting and tracing. She LOVES it. She begs to do school all day long :) Soon we will move onto letters and numbers I think!
Since she seems to be catching on very quickly and is so eager to learn, I contacted Rainbow preschool and they are going to be doing an assessment for special placement for her. The assessment will also help us know what to focus on with her homeschooling as well. Hopefully though she will start attending preschool around Thanksgiving time.
She will be having another surgery hopefully soon, nothing serious this time! She came home from Haiti with serious dental issues. In order to get them all fixed they are going to have to put her to sleep. This will be done down at Childrens Hospital in Minneapolis due to her heart condition. In fact, the only thing we are waiting for is for her cardiologist to agree that she can have this surgery so soon after open heart surgery.
She has made two more HUGE strides over the last month. First she is FINALLY potty trained! My other three kids were so easy, they were all potty trained with little effort on or before their second birthday. But Rodi was a different story. She was a little (or a lot) more stubborn, but one day it just clicked and that was it. Being potty trained has completely wiped out the problem of constipation she always had so that is great! Secondly, she is sleeping through the night :) This is the biggest victory of all if you ask me! Sleeping is something that we struggled with since the time she came home and it was aweful! I had to lie down with her so that she would go to sleep. The problem with that is that everytime she woke up in the middle of the night she would cry and need for me to come back in and lie down with her again. I was up 3 sometimes 4 times a night with her for almost a year. I had read so many books about sleep and tried everything I could think of. I really did not want to make her cry her self to sleep after all the trauma she has experienced in her life. But once I was out of other ideas crying it out was all that was left. It was hard for her for the first couple of nights but quickly she started falling asleep very shortly after I left the room and now she is sleeping all night. If she wakes up before the rest of us she will take her favorite books (SHE LOVES BOOKS!) to the bathroom and just look at the pictures until we get up :) It feels so nice to be getting a good nights sleep again!
A quick update about Michelle since a lot of you are fellow MAGIC moms, she will recieve her first shipment of growth hormone since March tomorrow!!! We are so excited. We have had a really rough road with her lately. Her blood sugars have been very out of control. Two weekends ago we were out and she could barely walk into the restaurant. She was shaking so badly by the time the food got to her that she was trying to hold her legs still with her hands but her arms were shaking so bad that she could barely use them. I had to cut up her food for her and help her eat it until she was better. That is by far the worst I have ever seen, and also the most scared I have ever been about her blood sugar! I was never in the room for her seizures so it was scary for me. We are now with a new endocrinologist. She now has a clinical diagnosis of Russell Silver Syndrome. This does not really change anything that we are doing with her. She has to continue to be on the Increlex, which we will now be able to get back to a theraputic dose once we restart the growth hormone. The new doctor told her that the best that we can hope for in regards to final adult height is 4'11". And this will only be possible if we are able to keep her on growth hormone and Increlex at a theraputic dose from now until she is done growing. With our insurance issues this makes it tough. So she was a little sad. We had a talk about how God has a plan for her life and has big things for her to do and if he needs her to be 4'11" to do them then that is ok! We got her to laugh but she still has her mind set that she is going to prove the doctor wrong HAHA! If anyone can do it, she can!
Have a wonderful day!
