Irelyn's First Thanksgiving 2009 and other updates!

I can't believe that Irelyn will be 12 weeks old tomorrow! Time is sure flying by so quickly. Today was her first Thanksgiving and it really turned out to be a nice day. We truly have a lot to be thankful for this year. Irelyn is an absolute blessing from God and our entire family adores her. She is doing very well with her weekly therapies. We have started getting therapy at home with a wonderful early intervention program through the state of Missouri called First Steps. The ladies are excellent and extremely knowledgeable in their fields and if everything goes as planned, they will both have the opportunity to work with Irelyn until she is three years old. One comes for Occupational Therapy which helps Irelyn work on her eating from a bottle and also with upper and lower body strength. She works on head control with her and does tummy time, along with different stretches. It definitely wears poor Irelyn out but the reward will be so worth it. The other lady is a Physical Therapist and she will basically whole body therapy. While she is so young it will be focused on more head control and learning how to roll over and just gaining strength. Again this makes Irelyn sleepy pretty quickly but she is getting stronger everyday.

Some other great things to update everyone on is that Irelyn still continues to go to Occupational Therapy at Children's Mercy South once weekly, and she has now increased to being able to take 20 cc's of formula by mouth for the last three visits!!! We are so excited about this, as we started out with her not being able to take any, and then she increased to 5 cc's, then 10 cc's, and now she is at 20 cc's. Although she eats much more than that at a time through her G-tube, this is still amazing progress and we are so proud of her.

Irelyn got her 2 month immunizations two weeks ago and did really well. I was really scared to have her get them. I know that they are important, however I was worried about what may go wrong. In the end she did great and is up to date on all her shots!

She is getting so big. She is starting to be awake for longer periods of time which is great. We love that. She is also smiling now and is just beautiful when she does it. Her whole little face just lights up and she gets so happy. She is also cooing now. It is great to see her interacting. Some days I get so down about her syndrome, and once she smiles at me, it makes me stop feeling sad. She is an amazing little person and we are so lucky and thankful to have her in our family.

Thank you all for following our blog. We will continue to update as things change. She has a follow-up with the Ortho Clinic on December 8th with a repeat hip ultrasound and we are hoping that we will be able to take her out of the harness for longer periods of time. We are hopeful this happens as she is so much happier when she is able to kick and stretch her legs freely. I hope everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving Day with your families.

The Watters