Update on Apollo

You know you have a large family when...

...your children feel sorry for families with only six or seven children.
...people ask if you're competing with the Duggars.
...even your friends aren't sure how many children you have.
...your family no longer fits in a 15 passenger van.
..complete strangers feel welcome to comment on your fertility and contraceptive methods.
...two of your daughters go for a walk...and get asked by a neighbor if they're foster kids.
...you have to carry three health insurance cards in your wallet- because that's how many it takes to fit everyone's name.
...you take the wrong child to the dentist...simply because your handwriting on the calendar was messy and both started with a "j".
...grocery shopping for 30 children and 12 adults for a two day camp constitutes a "small" shopping trip for you.
You find yourself relating some small incident to your husband and starting with the words, "Well, I only boiled twenty-six eggs for breakfast..."
...you buy a 40 pound box of bananas intending to make banana bread and freeze a bunch for smoothies...but your children eat them all first.
...you find an afternoon root canal relaxing.
...it takes you twenty-three minutes on the phone to schedule your children's dental appointments.
...you've given up on using your toaster entirely and make all of your toast under the broiler in you oven.
...you are seriously tempted by the stacking cribs you see at Goodwill for $19.99.
...you find yourself thinking, "Wow, the house is so quiet and peaceful with only nine children".
...you have enough children to constitute not one, but TWO large families.
...you have a laundry basket devoted entirely to lonely socks seeking their mate.
...when you got to buy your children those cool "spin toothbrushes" because you think they get their teeth so much cleaner...but the store doesn't carry enough styles/colors for your children to each have a different toothbrush.
...when you can't take all of your children to the doctor's office at the same time because the waiting room has only 10 seats.
...when you still have seven children that are required by law to sit in a carseat or booster seat.
...you call the doctor to get your children tetnus shots, and they tell you they don't have enough in the office and need to order more from the health department.
...you take up more than one entire pew in church.
...you take only half of your children to the library, and STILL get asked if they're all yours.
...you go to fill your children's flouride prescription at the phamacy and you clean them out of every pill they have...and it's still not enough.
...you spend sixty dollars on socks...and not everyone gets new socks.
...you go shopping at Costco and the cashier asks if you're having a soccer barbecue.

June 25, 2011

I find myself constantly trying to explain to people that we are not worried about Apollo being small, but about his lack of growth. Looking at his growth chart here shows the problem so much better than words.

{Please excuse the swiggley lines. While I can do all kinds of cool things in Photoshop, drawing lines is apparently not one of them}

You can see that at birth, two weeks and three months he was at 50 percentile...then at 3 months he drops down to ten percentile and by seven months he's off the chart completely. The doctor's consider a drop of more than two percentiles to be worrisome. And if you look at month seven through eleven, he keeps getting further and further away from bottom of the chart.

Yesterday afternoon he had his weight check appointment. The great news is he has gained a whopping pound and a half! You can clearly see just how much he jumped up on the chart. He's been wanting to eat nonstop lately and apparently it's been working.

The not so great news is the doctor wants him to go to Seattle Children's Hospital to get a sweat test for cystic fibrosis.

Let me try to explain the doctor's reasoning. As you know Apollo has been having breathing trouble this week. It's not his normal "noisy rattling in the throat" but more of a "deep wheeze". I was so glad the appointment coincided with this so the doctor could hear what I was talking about. The doctor listened for a very long time and said he can hear mucus settled low in his lungs. He said he's heard this before in Apollo's lungs and it seems to move around to different spots. Apollo has had a scope stuck down his throat which tells the doctor everything is structurally fine and rules out several causes of the noisey breathing. He said his wheezing does not sound asthmatic. He said with asthma the noise comes of the out breath, Apollo's noise is when he breathes in. The fact that he is off milk, on reflux medicine, gaining weight and doing well but STILL has this wheezing/trouble breathing points toward a mucus issue. Cystic fibrosis is essentially mucus that is so thick a person can't remove from their body...it gums everything up.

So that's where we are right now. I will be taking Apollo in today for a blood draw for a celiac panel and then we wait for a call about his appointment in Seattle.

06:54 AM in Baby 2010 | Permalink

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{Please excuse the swiggley lines. While I can do all kinds of cool things in Photoshop, drawing lines is apparently not one of them}

The not so great news is the doctor wants him to go to Seattle Children's Hospital to get a sweat test for cystic fibrosis.

So that's where we are right now. I will be taking Apollo in today for a blood draw for a celiac panel and then we wait for a call about his appointment in Seattle.

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June 25, 2011

Update on Apollo

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