A Little Trooper!

Livi just amazes me each time we go in for surgery or some other medical procedure. She's got the most incredible recuperative powers. She took one dose of pain medication right after the surgery and hasn't needed any more since. The swelling is completely gone and she looks amazing! She's such a little trooper!

Anyway--that was our last surgery. Now we get back into our therapies routine and follow up with a couple specialists (opthalmology and orthopedics), but we don't expect any negative reports in any case. Oh--we also have an evaluation by the school district in a couple months to see what services she will qualify for once she turns 3 in July. I'm hoping they say they think she won't need anything but speech and PT, but we'll see!

Otherwise, things are going great! I've finished all the Christmas shopping and now just have to get everything wrapped and/or put together. But that's another story...

~ Jeana

Happy Holidays!

December is flying by, folks! I feel like I'm in a non-stop winner-take-all race to the end of the month. This week was the last week of classes, next week is finals, I have several projects due over the next couple weeks in my day job, Livi has surgery on Wednesday, Dad has surgery on the 20th, Christmas is just a couple weeks away, and I hope I can survive the journey! Today Livi and I sojourned out to get some holiday photos done. It's in the 80's here, so it's hard to dress Christmassy! We did manage to find the perfect Livi Christmas hat, though!

Last weekend I took Livi to see Santa. She wasn't really thrilled with him. She didn't cry or anything--just wouldn't smile. We ended up with a photo that's practically a duplicate of last year's, so I'm going to use these other ones as our holiday photos for this year. I'm almost done with the Christmas shopping. I still have to find one more thing for my mom and pick up some gift cards for my brothers and nephews, but otherwise all is done! Livi is going to rack up the gifts this year, though! Whew!

I mentioned Livi's surgery earlier--it's the one to remove all of her hardware. As you can see from these photos, she has a really nice jawline now. We could have even brought it out a little bit further, but I'm happy with where it's at. She still has a mild overbite, but nothing serious. She's finally starting to build a vocabulary, too. We're up to more than 30 fairly intelligible words. Hurray! The next step is to get her to start combining them in phrases. And on the physical side, while she's still off the charts, her height has jumped up to 32.5 inches and her weight is about 21 lbs. She'll probably always be on the small side, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book!

I'll post more the next time I get to come up for air. In the meantime--happy holidays, everyone!

~ Jeana