Alynne Tiffany- 18 Months
Alynne is officially a year and a half old! She is getting so big on us! Here is what has happened this month:
Her language is developing more and more. Almost daily, I hear her mimicking what I'm saying and learning new words. She has added these words to her vocabulary: Window (doh), slide, cheese, all done (da done), duck, knee (meeee), toes, butt paste (this one was quite hilarious!!), dog, go, bye bye, J.D. (a friend's name!), tree, shoe, and chair. She also says Mami and Papi now, before she used to say Ma and Pa.
We went to Oklahoma for a week and a half this month. We had such a great time of relaxation, and Aly got to spend a lot of time with her grandparents, which was wonderful! At Gigi and Pops house she quickly became obsessed with the slide and trampoline they had for her. She mastered them quickly! She also got to go for a swim while there! At grandpa's, she got explore around outside, and she loved crawling over Grandpa!
While we were there we took Alynne to the OKC Zoo. It was beautiful weather, and Alynne got to walk around some and look at all of the animals. Our favorite was the baby elephant!
Alynne also got to be a flower girl for the first time in my friend Emily's wedding. She did so great! She was really unsure of the tall grass (city girl!!), so she had to have Papi walk her down the isle =]
Alynne has a weird obsession with me cleaning her toes haha. I have no idea how this even started, but at least once a day she asks me to pick the lint out of her toes!! Silly girl.
Aly played in her first little splash pad on a really hot morning here. She was pretty skeptical of it, but slowly ventured in to the middle--until she got sprayed in the face, and then she cautiously played on the edge the rest of the time!
She has started this new thing where she brings me into her teepee and has me lay down next to her. She then points at "things" on the ceiling and babbles to me like she's telling me stories. She'll look over and make sure I'm paying attention and occasionally give me a kiss. These are the moments that I wish I could live in forever!!
We had her 18 month check up. She is 22 lbs and 30.5 inches tall, still little all around!
I feel like Alynne is understanding so much more these days. For example, the other day, she was sitting at her table coloring while I was making dinner. I turned around to find her standing at the baby gate, crayons in hand. I asked her if she was done coloring, and she immediately said "no!". So I told her if she didn't want to be done that she needed to go back to the table to color, and she immediately went and sat back down! It's really great being able to have small conversations with her now!
We celebrated Mother's Day with Lito and Lita. They came to visit, and we all went to my favorite brunch spot- Jacob's Pickles!
Aly loves to play hair dresser and "fix" my hair. She's pretty gentle, so I don't mind ;)
She has started getting picky with the books we read. I must ask her if she wants to read 10 different books before she says yes to one!
Alynne and I sat in on her first dance class! It was a friend's class that is for 3/4 year olds, so it was definitely too advanced. Aly loved it though, and I was actually surprised at the things she was capable of doing! She loved to gallop, turn, and plie!
And I saved probably the longest portion for last-an update on Alynne's sleepy problems.
A couple days after we got back from Oklahoma, Alynne had another episode. It's crazy because the second I go in to her room in the morning, I can tell it's going to happen- the way she cries, and is super clammy. So that day, we spent all afternoon at the pediatricians getting blood work and urine samples. Aly was asleep through most of the process. The doctor decided to give her a cookie towards the end of the day(she should love the doctor now! We don't even give her cookies!!) , and she perked up a bit after that, her blood sugar was definitely low! That evening our pediatrician sent us to Cornell's ER so that her blood sugar could be monitored through the night, and then we could meet with their endocrine team the next day. So that is what we did. We went through the ER and eventually made our way to the pediatric ward around 2:30am, where we spent the rest of the night and next day. By the time we got there, Aly was of course back to her normal self. Poor thing has such small difficult veins that she got pricked about 9 times for IV and to get blood taken, and that's not even including all of the finger and toe pricks to check her glucose levels!! It is so incredibly hard to have to hold down your crying child while she is being poked and she just stared at me looking at me like why are you letting this happen to me? Ugh!! The worst. And poor Aly is utterly terrified of all doctors and nurses now.
Anyways, we spent the next day meeting with an Endocrine team, neurologists, and geneticist. Everyone we met with was wonderful! We are seriously so grateful for our pediatrician and for all of these top notch doctors who are trying to get to the bottom of all of this! Unfortunately, we continue to stump everyone we meet. Besides having these episodes of sleeping 24-36 straight hours, Alynne is perfectly healthy and growing and developing normally. All of the blood work from the hospital stay came back normal.
We spent the next week having to check Alynne's blood sugar levels every morning at home. She is such a brave little girl, by the end of the week, she barely even whimpered when we pricked her. And all of her levels were normal.
So next step was to visit a metabolic center for more testing, which we did yesterday. This was another miserable experience since Aly had to fast beforehand. By the time she got her blood taken, she hadn't eaten in 18 hours and was begging us for food. So awful!!
So we should find out about those tests next week, and then after that we are supposed to go to some neurologists for more testing.
It has been an incredibly exhausting couple of weeks dealing with all of this. We are grateful that doctors have been able to rule out anything serious, but we still would like to get to the bottom of it all. We would really like for everyone to just be in prayer for our sweet girl during all of this. Pray that we can get to the bottom of this all soon, and that it's nothing serious, and pray for Aly (and our) strength as we continue to go through more and more testings.
