Catching up w/Jameson, part 3

March 13, 2009:
I need to say this before I forget. You are so much fun these days. You sleep better. We can put you to bed awake and you either sing/talk yourself to sleep or you turn on your mobiles/music and listen to it while you relax. You’re a little boy now. It’s wonderful and amazing to see you grow. You are so special and loved very deeply. You love books and bring them to us to read often. You sit on the floor and shake your legs back and forth in excitement. You are moving all over the place now. You walk from one piece of furniture to the next and you can stand on your own for a few seconds. You are well on your way to walking. And lastly, you are finally starting to get into the TV. Not that we encourage couch potato-ness, but we can put on Baby Genius or Sesame Street videos and you love to watch the animals and sing along to the kids on the TV. It’s wonderful.

April 20, 2009:
It’s been a very rough 6 weeks, Jameson. You have been so sick and it’s endless. Absolutely endless. The mucus in the back of your throat hasn’t gone away since Christmastime. I’m not exaggerating. It causes you to cough a lot, almost constantly. It causes you to vomit almost daily because you still have no teeth and the food catches the back of your throat and you can’t seem to get the food past the thick gobs of mucus at the back of your throat. It causes you to get constant ear infections and eye infections. In the last three weeks alone, you’ve had a high fever of 103.9 and then a rash which ended up being Rosiola, which is basically a viral infection that goes away on its own. Then you got pneumonia, which brought you to Children’s Hospital in Hartford, where you were given oxygen because your pulse oxidation levels were low, and you were given a nebulizer treatment, steroids, and put on Augmentin. Your temperature reached 103.1, so you also got Tylenol. The Augmentin, acid reflux medication, prednisone (steroids for your lungs), and Tylenol were extremely difficult to give you twice daily. You would choke on them, and half the time, you would vomit it right back up. It was heartbreaking in many ways. We knew if you didn’t get the medicine in, you might relapse and not get better. And watching you vomit over and over was very difficult for us. And when you were finally getting better from pneumonia (except your mucus never got better), you got some sort of stomach bug because 1 week to the day from the ER visit at Children’s hospital, you woke up with more poop in your crib than what could fill 4 diapers. The poop was everywhere. I can’t even begin to explain how awful the next 48 hours were. You had the worst diarrhea and you vomited a lot as well. You were lethargic and constantly cranky. That was last weekend. I ended up with the flu, and your dad was also sick this past week. Over the weekend, you turned 14 months, and we had a fabulous time with you. You are still moody, needy, clingy, and stubborn, but you didn’t vomit!!! And you took your first steps!! Solid steps! Walking isn’t fast enough, so you usually hunker down on your butt and start crawling after a few steps, but you can stand on your own now and each day, you are getting more and more confident. You are a child with a lot of coordination and athleticism, so I’m surprised you aren’t walking yet, but with all the sickness you’ve struggled through, I’m certainly not worried about you. You are so intelligent, Jameson. You amaze us every day.