9 Weeks!

Well Thanksgiving definitely made this week fly by, hopefully with more Holiday’s coming up a few more will go by just as fast!

Your Baby:

• Is about the size of a grape, or perhaps a cocktail olive, the kind that’s marinated in vermouth and stuffed with blue cheese.
• (Is not marinated in vermouth or stuffed with blue cheese.)
• Has fingers and toes and eyelids and ears.
• External boy and girl-parts are present, but won’t be really distinguishable for another couple weeks.

You:

• Have a uterus the size of a flipping grapefruit, lady.
• *BARF* Again. Still.
• With all the extra blood pumping through your system (about 50% more blood volume, actually), your body temperature may be a little jacked up — if you’re constantly complaining about being too hot or too cold, this is why.

 

This week has been the worst for nausea and food aversions…I’m definitely counting down for the 2nd trimester so that yucky feeling will go away.  My energy level is staying pretty low and my face is breaking out horribly (that didn’t happen with Ryder).  I’m not in maternity pants yet, but I can’t button my jeans.  Jamie gave me her bella band and that seems to be doing the trick…and as you’ll see below wearing over sized hoodies makes me feel better too!

Ryder went from being completely clueless about the new baby, to being completely knowledgeable.  He talks about him/her every day and always asks if he can kiss my belly!  He knows there’s a baby in there and sometimes I’ll ask him “what do you think the baby is doing right now?” and he’ll either say “sleeping” or “swimming”!  I’m pretty sure he’s right :)  He kept asking if the baby could play, and I always tell him he has to wait a while so the other day he said “baby can’t play…be patient?!”  So smart!

Here we are:

Thanksgiving Eve

The best part about Thanksgiving (well besides the food, of course) is that it provides the perfect time to really reflect on your life and realize all that you have to be thankful for.

This Thanksgiving I am SO very thankful for the gift of life.  The life we brought into this world last year, and the new life stirring inside of me now.  Ryder’s life lights ours up, I just can’t imagine a single day without him in it.  I can only assume that another child will give us double the joy…so much to be thankful for!

I’m thankful for family.  My husband especially, he is perfect for me.  My immediate family who is there every day, walking life’s journey with us.  And for the extended…you know we have lots of it!  It’s just a warm feeling to know that you have so many places or people to turn to for support.

I’m also thankful for the friendships I’ve made over the years.  They are the ones that are so special, you know they will last a lifetime.  Friends that offer so much encouragement and let you vent and don’t judge you and are genuine.  I’ve learned that you reach a point in your life where you realize which friendships those are and you cherish them, because they are worth it!

Jesus…I am so very thankful for Him.  Without Him I would have nothing to be thankful for. 

I hope that everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving…and remembers all that they have to be thankful for!

Such a Little Man

Some of my favorite things that Ryder says or does are things that Alan teaches him.  It makes me realize how important it is for a boy to have his Daddy, because there are certain things that Mommy would just never think to teach her son…like the difference between an automatic car and a stick shift, the noise a Harley Davidson makes, and what you do when you see a deer:

One thing that has surprised me is how much of a help Alan is in the potty department.  Lately since Ryder has been telling us that he is going potty in his diaper, Alan has been teaching him about the potty and how it all works and bringing him to observe when he has to go.  We always let him go sit on his potty with his clothes on and let him pretend to go, and we sit him on his potty before bath time, but he has never gone, he just pretends.  BUT…tonight, shortly after I took that video, he wanted his pants off and right after I took them off he said “Ryder go potty?”  So I took his diaper off and I let him sit on the BIG BOY potty this time, and much to my surprise, he PEED!!!  I was so excited, and so was he, mainly because that meant he was allowed to flush the toilet!  We told Daddy when he got home (from an ice-cream run, we are spoiled!) and he was super excited too!  We were going to wait until the summer time to start potty training, but maybe we’ll attempt it after Christmas and see if we can get anywhere!

8 Weeks!

Another milestone today…I’m 8 weeks pregnant!  Here’s what’s going on this week:

Your baby:

• Is about the size of a gummy bear or kidney bean, and dear LORD I promise to be done with the bean comparisons soon, because it is all entirely too precious.
• Is extremely jointy, with fingers and toes and elbows and knees that s/he can bend and wiggle.
• Almost doesn’t have a tail anymore.

You:

• Are possibly a walking ball of first-trimester misery, if I may project myself on you for a bit.
• *BARF*
• OMG I HAVE TO PEE I JUST PEED OMG I HAVE TO PEE AGAIN
• May be having trouble sleeping at night, despite being exhausted.

 

Yes, the first trimester misery is in full swing!  I am bloated and fat and tired and nauseous and moody.  But I’m trying to ignore all of those symptoms and make the best of each day because I still have a very important job to fulfill…there is a man and a little boy that need me to still be available as their Mommy & Wife.  It’s kind of good though because sometimes I get so side tracked that I don’t notice the symptoms or even remember that I’m pregnant, instead of dwelling on every single ache or pain like the first time around.  It felt really good to see the heartbeat on the sonogram so I went ahead and told my work about the pregnancy.  And, we traded in my car on a full-sized SUV so we’ll have plenty of room for another car seat…and stroller…and everything else that comes along with having 2 kids. 

Don’t ask me why a gummy bear needs THIS much room already, but apparently Ryder thinks its funny!:

20 Months!!

Wow…I mean seriously…where has the time gone?  We are very quickly approaching Ryder’s 2nd Birthday!  Seeing his age in months reach the 20’s has now made that a reality.

Here’s what Ryder is up to this month:

• He is very small for his age, only weighing in at 22 pounds.  He wears mostly 12 month pants and 18 month tops.
• He has a great appetite, but Mommy had to make a new “no snacking before dinner” rule because he has started to ask for things like donuts and gummy worms for dinner! 
• He has started to recognize things that are similar.  For example, he will go in his room and bring us all of his monster trucks, or all of his dirtbikes, or in the waiting room at therapy he will go through the crayon box and pick out all of the green crayons.
• He is putting so many words together now and forming sentences, and it shocks me when I tell him something like “Daddy’s not home, he went hunting this morning” and he repeats the whole thing back to me “Daddy not home, Daddy went hunting!”  It amazes me the things that come out of his mouth and how he understands everything that we tell him.  He has some really BIG words he says too, like another, different, calculator, and microwave!
• He’s soooooo sweet!  I love when he says “Mommy I NEED you” and when he asks for kisses all the time.  And my favorite is when we say goodbye and he says “miss you”. 
• He is testing us and himself a lot lately…doing things he knows he’s not allowed just to see our reaction, or jumping really close to the edge of the bed to see what will happen.  The other night I put him to bed and noticed a few minutes later that the light in his room was on!  I opened the door and caught him playing, but when he saw me he dove into his pillow and pretended to be sleeping!!!  Now every night I have to be on light duty for a few minutes to make sure he goes to sleep, if his light flicks on, I open the door, and he looks so shocked like “how does she always know?!”.  One night he heard me coming and turned it off and laid down!  He is SO the quiet mischievous type just like his Daddy!
• We have been asking him about the new baby lately, if he wants a boy baby or a girl baby.  He always changes his answer, so we never know what we’re going to get.
• We had lots of Doctor appointments and Therapy appointments this month, all of which are helping us move forward on his road to recovery!
• He talks about Team Ryder and the Kidney Walk ALL the time!  Any time he sees someone in their Team Ryder shirt he knows exactly what it says and gets so excited.  We raised a total of $2,823 this year for the National Kidney Foundation and had over 50 people on Team Ryder, so that was such a huge blessing for us!

This month has been fun and exciting and exhausting and has flown by sooooo fast!  Ryder is the best source of joy and entertainment that ever could have been brought into our lives and we are so very thankful for him.  Love this boy!

It’s Video Time!

Just some talk about cars:

He won’t watch TV, so he has to learn all of his characters from his diapers:

Animal sounds never get old, so here you go, for your entertainment! :)

Doctors, Doctors Everywhere!

We had a day filled with Dr. Appt’s today…it feels good to finally be home.  We left the house around 8am and didn’t make it home until 6pm! 

Our 1st stop was in Richmond to Ryder’s kidney doctor, Dr. Winslow (as Ryder has renamed “Docta Wednesday!”).  We love this Doctor SO much.  He got to meet Ryder right when he was born and has truly cared about his progress in life, even aside from just his kidney development.  But the point of the appointment was to check his kidney development and we got another GREAT report!  Ryder’s kidney’s have been progressively looking better at each appointment and he was really pleased to see on the sonogram this time that the right kidney has grown (the past few it has kind of stayed the same size) and caught up to the left!  It was a miracle in and of itself that the right kidney regained function after rupturing, but to now see that it has caught up to the left just shows how amazing Ryder’s little body is.  He was very happy to hear that Ryder is telling us when he’s peeing because that is a sign that he’s getting good sensation.  Now we need to figure out whether he can feel his bladder filling up, or can only feel it at the point when he is peeing.  His bladder has huge bands of muscle around it, so potty training is going to be very…interesting!  Other than that, we talked about Ryder’s stroke, and the new baby on the way.  He again reassured me that Posterior Urethral Valves is not something that shows up in siblings, but that the kidney’s should still be checked as the pregnancy progresses just to be cautious.

Luckily, Ryder’s next appointment was in the same building, right down the hall, at the Ophthalmologist (Ryder’s version: “Da EYE Docta!”)  This one was rough because they had to put eye drops in his eyes to dilate them, which made his vision really blurry for FIVE hours!  When we left there the poor things was burying his head in his Daddy’s shirt saying “its BRIGHT ousside! need sungwasses!”  But let me rewind, the reason we took Ryder to the eye doctor is because we have been noticing for a while that sometimes it seems like Ryder’s left eye focuses and his right eye drifts out of focus.  Well, we were right that something isn’t right, but that’s not it.  Ryder has…wait for it…Sixth Cranial Nerve Palsy.  I mean, really?!  Can’t it ever just be nothing?!  Basically what that means is that Ryder has a nerve way in the back of his brain that is not letting his left eye reach all the way around to the left to see things, if it did then he would be seeing in double vision.  So when he needs to see something to the left he turns his whole head instead of his eye, then uses his right eye to focus on it.  And when he needs to focus on something straight ahead he is turning his head slightly to the left to focus both eyes straight.  There’s nothing that needs to be done about it right now, because just like everything else that was affected by his stroke, there is a chance that his brain will make a new pathway to correct the problem itself.  So the Doctor wants to see him again in 1 year to check the progress.  If his body never corrects the problem, then it will require surgery to loosen the muscles in his left eye to allow his eye to reach further around and allow his right eye to stop compensating.  It will be imperative that his body corrects this or that surgery is done before  he will ever be able to play sports or drive a car.  Please pray that his body (by that I mean God!) will fix it.  We have seen His healing power in Ryder’s life many times before, I’d just hate to see him have to be put to sleep again, but we’ll cross that road if/when we get to it.

After that, it was time for a sneak peek at Baby Marsh v2 (thanks for the creative name Nicki!).  Since Ryder had already been traumatized at two doctor appointments, we figured it’d be better to let him sit out of this one.  So Daddy & Ryder dropped me off, and they went toy shopping…and to go look at bunkbeds because they are convinced this is a baby boy!  Thank goodness they didn’t come, I was there for THREE hours!  But to see that sweet little heartbeat is always worth the wait.  I had the most awkward heart-to-heart of my life…I’m sorry for the visual, but as I’m sitting there getting an internal sonogram, the Sonographer asked me how everything turned out with Ryder’s kidneys.  Let me give you a little background, when they found out I had diabetes with Ryder, they sent me for a sonogram with her at 30 weeks because my belly was measuring 4 weeks big.  People with diabetes have big babies so they wanted to check in on his growth.  When she did that sonogram, she noticed that his ureters were dilated.  She reported it to the Doctor who then sent me to the Perinatologist…and the rest is history, Ryder’s kidneys and bladder continued to swell until he had to be born by emergency c-section at 34 weeks.  Anyway, back to the heart-to-heart, i’m laying there with this big you know what stuck you know where and we both have tears streaming down our faces because she asked me what would have happened if she hadn’t noticed that swelling, and I told her that Ryder never would have made it.  We both agreed that the diabetes was pure Divine Intervention!  God put me in her office that day because He needed her to see that swelling, and it seriously saved his life.  She saved his life!  She told me thank you, for helping her to remember that her job does make a difference, and I thanked her…for doing her job! 

Poor Baby Marsh v2, we then both realized that we were there for a purpose, to look at the NEW baby (I’m starting to feel like I’m already neglecting this poor child!)  Everything looked great, the heartbeat was 145 bpm, and the baby was measuring at 7 weeks 4 days.  That gives me a due date of July 1st!!  Here’s a picture of our sweet little blob:

I met with my Dr. after the sonogram and he said that everything looks great, but I do have a cyst on my right ovary that they want to look at again to make sure it goes away.  They’ll be scheduling an appointment for me to see the high-risk Doctor at 12 weeks, and I need to come back to see my regular OB in 3 weeks.  Sometime before then I need to get all my blood work done and a 1 hour glucose test…YAY! 

Wow, that was a lot of information…for you and for me!  Thanks for sticking through it :)  Now I need to go rest my brain!

Oh wait, I almost forgot…Ryder and Daddy came back to the office before I was done and I heard them outside playing.  So I got my camera out and took pictures out of my 2nd floor window (this was great entertainment during my looooong wait for the doctor), seriously, how much do these pictures look private investigation?!  And the truth is, Ryder started running towards the parking lot and just as I was contemplating how hurt I would get if I jumped out of the window…Daddy hopped the fence, caught him, and spanked his butt.  ONE FOR DADDY!  Maybe I should spy more often!

Before the incident:

After the incident:

 

Oh how I love these boys.

Okay, done, for real.