Kristen’s Blog

A funny thing Isaac did last week…  Jeff, Isaac, and I were sitting at the dinner table eating and talking.  Jeff and I were having an animated conversation and laughing while Isaac was jabbering nearly as much as we were.  Jeff and I stopped to look at him and he opened his mouth to say something.  Then he smiled and said, “Uh Oh.”  We started laughing because we both realized he started to say something and then forgot what he was saying.  It was too funny.  Then Isaac was embarrassed because he knew we were laughing at him.  Kids are so smart.

I had a weird day at work today.  Two of my patients, brothers, who were scheduled yesterday didn’t show up today.  At least we were able to see one patient in their place, but it is frustrating when people’s irresponsibility flows into my work day like that.  I had another patient no-show and then I saw an emergency at the end of the day.  The emergency was interesting because I think he had a tooth root fracture, maybe 2 fractures.  I love that stuff.

We are hoping for a mellow weekend.  We have been running from one thing to the next.  Some of the busyness has included home improvement stuff, but it is still busyness.  I really want to go to bed early.  Isaac is still waking up about 5 am every morning.  He can usually go back to sleep, but I hear him chattering none the less.  Sometimes I have to get up with him, and rarely can he get himself back to sleep.  I am trying an experiment tonight.  I have cranked up his humidifier and have turned the thermostat down a bit.  Maybe it has been too dry and he is getting a stuffy nose, and maybe he has been getting too hot.  It is hard to know the temperature downstairs in the middle of the night as we are upstairs. 

Here’s another couple fun pictures from Christmas this year.  (I love the one where he is giving me love!)  Enjoy!

We took quite a few pictures over Christmas this year, mainly of Isaac.  I’ll try to get some of them up over the next couple of weeks. 

He sat down at his kid sized table at my parent’s house on Sunday afternoon.   First I set him up with a book to read. 

Then my dad set him up with an old laptop.  The laptop works fine, it is just painfully slow.  He LOVED it. My dad put in a Baby Einstein DVD and he couldn’t stop giggling.

We had a nice time over Christmas visiting family and friends.  It is great when the hustle and bustle is over and you can truly sit down and enjoy.  We hope you did, too!

We are trying to get the last minute shopping and Christmas preparations done.  Saturday was a very long day of baking, and although I feel I am still trying to recover from it 3 days later I really enjoyed doing it and sharing the love and gratitude to friends, family, and Jeff’s co-workers. 

I’ll try to post some recent pictures of Isaac soon.  One new thing Isaac is doing is singing “Deck the Halls” with mommy.  I sing “Fa la la la la” and he does too!  Too cute!

Isaac refused to tell anyone what a monkey says yesterday.  He is funny- one day he will do something you ask and the next day he’ll have nothing to do with it.  Ha!

Oh the hustle and bustle!  I love this time of year, but now we just need another hour in the day.  The Christmas shopping is coming along, Christmas cards are not even addressed, and the baking will happen this weekend.  I am so thankful to have 2 days off during the week to get things done.  Isaac is taking one long nap during the day now and that is really working out well.  I just hope he can get over his ear infection soon.  The poor kid keeps bumping into walls and tripping over little things because his equilibrium is off from the infection.  I hope the antibiotics clear it up soon.

I better get going… the cookie dough will not stir itself!

I really need to get going with my Christmas shopping. I just finished decorating our Christmas tree yesterday, and now I am feeling more in the Christmas spirit. I didn’t get all of our decorations up this year as I didn’t feel like getting them all out. I figure I am doing good decorating the tree and keeping Isaac from tearing it down. He does really well with it, so far he just wants to touch the different textures of the tree and close-to-the-ground ornaments.

I am planning on doing a ton of baking this weekend. My mom and I will spend all day Saturday baking and decorating cookies. I plan on making Christmas sugar cookies, peanut butter balls, orange balls, fudge, and brittle cookies. Yum. I’ll also be making about 3 recipes worth of yeast rolls. Also yum! Jeff, Isaac, and I are going to Thousand Oaks to visit Jeff’s family and celebrate an early Christmas dinner, thus the rolls. I love this recipe of rolls, it was my Grandma’s. Every holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter…) when we were kids she would bring the rolls. Now that she is gone, my mom usually makes the rolls for our family gatherings. Since it is Jeff’s family’s get together I will be bringing them. I hope to be as good at making them as my mom and Grandma. One other thing I’d like to be as good at is making pie crusts. I know practice makes perfect, but I just hate to fight the dough when rolling it out, getting it to the pie plate, and then if it is a pre-bake shell trying to not let it shrink down in the plate. It is my observation that all these things take decades to master, and since I don’t make that many pies it may take me a lifetime. By the time I get it right, I’ll be too old to be trusted with the pies. I’ll probably be trying to make a Kitty Kibble pie by then… ever see Christmas Vacation?

I am really looking forward to seeing Christmas through Isaac’s eyes. I expect this year to be very different from previous years. Although he is just one year old, you can see him processing what is going on. So much fun…

One last thing, yesterday when we were waiting to be seen by the pediatrician we were talking about the animals they had painted on the walls of the exam room. There were a couple zebras and a monkey. We used to talk about monkeys a lot, but not lately. I asked Isaac what a monkey said and then made the noises myself. He picked up on this right away, as if he’d been waiting for the chance to show me he remembered and knew what to say. He mimicked me and hasn’t stopped telling me since yesterday what a monkey says. Too cute.

First, the good news! Isaac’s heart is doing very well. The cardiologist has taken him off his medication and believes he has outgrown his heart problem! Yay! We need to watch him for the next couple months until he has another Holter test done to see how he tolerates being off the medication. After his appointment we took him up to the corridors of the NICU where he stayed for 6 days when he was 2 weeks old.  We took a picture of him standing at the wall of handprints of NICU graduates. He looked so small, yet he is so big compared to when he was there the last time.

Second, the bad news. After this appointment, I noticed he wasn’t feeling right. He had not been himself for the last couple days and I attributed it to teething, but thought there were enough symptoms to get him checked out by his pediatrician. I called and was able to get him right in for an appointment. So we ran back home. (For all that Isaac has been through, the office staff always give him a room of his own to wait in right away and we don’t have to wait with all the sick kids in the waiting room. It is great.) Isaac has an ear infection. I am not sure how long he has had it, I suspect that it has been brewing for a couple weeks. We had him checked out at the local urgent care Thanksgiving weekend and they didn’t find anything. I think the symptoms were there, but clinically unnoticeable. Poor baby. It won’t be long for him to be feeling like himself again, I am sure.

It is hard to believe it was just a year ago that we almost lost Isaac. He is a thriving little boy with a sweet spirit.

Today at work, it was a normal day.  I went to Santa Barbara and saw 7 patients.  Lupita and I had lunch at Sushi Teri and I was able to leave the office by 4:40pm, which was great considering my Mom and Dad were watching Isaac and they needed to leave by 6pm for a Christmas party.  My day went well, all my patients showed up and I enjoyed seeing a couple of people I have been taking care of for a little more than 6 years now.

One in particular made me smile for most of the day today.  He is an older gentleman with severe Parkinson’s Disease.  He rides a bike everywhere he wants to go because he cannot drive.  (Trust me, I have seen him walk and wonder how he is able to stay on a bike, not to mention he is nearly blind!)  He is usually down on life because physically he is a wreck, but mentally he is sharp.  He was beaming as soon as he walked in the door and exclaimed to the front office person how much he loves his new teeth!  The dentist I work for made him a complete lower denture supported by dental implants and a new upper partial denture.  He was thrilled that he could eat anything he wanted!  That is one of the best aspects of my job.  It doesn’t seem like a job because I am doing something I love and it makes me happy to see the positive impact we have on someone’s health and happiness. 

I love happy days.  Then I get to go home and experience the best part of my day: seeing the smile on Isaac’s face as I walk in the door.  Sigh.

We celebrated Isaac’s first birthday last weekend. Yes, that is a “Happy 1st Birthday” crown he is wearing! There was a matching bib, too! He had a great time at the party. He received lots of neat things, but I think his favorite was his Tigger Ride-on Airplane, the Ride on Fire Engine, and Leapfrog Alphabet Pal. The airplane has a propeller that spins and the fire engine blows bubbles! Too cute!

We had much to celebrate with this little guy making it through his first year. We will know soon if he has grown out of his heart problem. He still takes the medication twice a day, and is doing really well.

He is such a treasure, we love him to pieces. Hard to imagine what life was like before him. He has made our lives so rich and full.

Our new bed arrived yesterday. And after a very late night waiting on the mattress pad and sheets to get out of the washer and dryer, we finally enjoyed a really good night’s sleep. It was wonderful. I still had to get out of bed at 4:00 and 4:45 am to tend to Isaac, but Jeff never felt the bed move. Ahhh! We have had to totally re-arrange our bedroom to accommodate the new, bigger bed but I think it was worth it. Now I just have to deal with what is left over of my desk mess. I am wanting to clear it out and store all my scrapbook stuff in cubes or on a bookshelf. I hope to have this project done by the end of the month.

Better go get our little man out of bed now. I hear him saying “Uh-Oh”.