He has learned what bubbles are and absolutely loves them. Though I think he likes the bottle they come in more than the actual bubbles. On Easter Sunday he signed his first sign while big Cousin Charlotte was jumping up and down with a stuffed animal on her head in front of him. We were all sitting around and asked Kellan if he wanted more....and he clapped his little hands together. It was amazing! Since then he has signed 'more' on a daily basis. If only his 'more' didn't look like his clap we would be in really good shape. You can imagine the level of teaching that has gone on since that day for him to pick up more signs. There is no better feeling than seeing him learn something we work so hard to teach him. He has mastered eating puffs and graham crackers (finally), hoping to move him on to some other foods and phase out the bottles in the next few months. Our bank account sure would love to not buy so much formula!
He has become so much more interactive in the last couple months. He still continues and LOVES to pull hair, or your chin or cheek skin. Sounds pleasant, huh? We are working on teaching "no", but most times he just smiles and continues doing what he was doing regardless of how serious our "no' is. He has come to love dropping or pushing things off any surface. Last night he managed to lift the tray off his high chair. Brett went over to him and told Kellan to not drop it. Kellan sat there with the entire tray in his hand dangling it over the side...and then, of course dropped it. Stinker! It's refreshing to see the defiant behavior though. He continues to still put everything in his mouth, cannot wait for this teething nonsense to be over. It's pretty tough to count how many he has in there because if your fingers go anywhere near his little mouth, he will for sure chomp down on them. I think he has 8 bottom teeth and probably that many on top too. It's sad when his laundry needs to be done because you ran out of bibs.
Below he is in his standing machine we are borrowing from his Physical Therapist. Don't let the smiley happy face fool you, he only likes to be in it for about 30 seconds. He is supposed to stand in there for 30 minutes per day. Because of his low muscle tone and not using his legs to stand for most of his life so far, Kris the Physical Therapist is concerned that his hip socket hasn't properly formed to "cup" his hip bone. We need to get better at having him spend time in here. I feel myself getting frustrated and sad at times, I just wish we could play with him and let him do whatever he wants like a normal baby. Instead I feel like we constantly need to be working out with him, engaging his core, tracking his vision, practice having him on his hands and knees (4 point) to prepare for crawling, and the list goes on. He has certainly mastered going from sitting to standing if we offer our hands out to him for support. All he wants to do now is stand and though he doesn't have the strength yet, he tries to pull up on everything.
Kellan's school had Carnival Night a few weeks ago. We learned there that he loves sitting at a table and chair and is always very proud of himself for sitting there. A sad moment when all the kids got to decorate cupcakes and Kellan sat there watching, not being able to eat or touch them because of his dairy allergy. Clearly as you can see in the picture, not a sad moment for him, he was as happy as can be. As I watched all the kids in his class run around and a parent give me a strange look when I responded to her question, "How old is he?" I realized though Kellan LOVES kids and doesn't know anything different, it is sometimes hard to be around normal functioning kids. A hard lesson as his mom to remind myself that Kellan doesn't know anything different and he is happy just how he is.
He has managed to be sick for I think 3 months straight. We have done 3 different antibiotics over the course of the few months and he still sounds very congested and his nose is running constantly. We are on to antibiotic #4, though I think the true medicine we need is sunshine and warmer weather. Because of our little sicky, we got to weigh him....STILL has not hit the 20lb mark, darn't! He weighed in at 19lbs 14oz just shy of being 16 months.
We've had a nice little break from Children's the last couple months, but we have quite a few follow up appointments coming up. We had Audiology to check his hearing again. We went in the sound booth and decided we will not be going back as frequently as they want us to for follow up appointments. He can't hear out of his left ear, but once he saw the blinking little animal on the left side of the sound booth, that little thing is all he would look at! I think he is just too little to really get any idea of what he hears from the sound booth. If we would suspect his hearing changed, we would bring him in, but for now we know he can hear, just not great.
We will be seeing allergy again to test him against dogs, we suspect he has an allergy to them. We also follow up with opthamology to check his eye. He continues to HATE the eye drop, a little anxious to hear what they have to say. Our last appointment is with GI, cannot wait to see what our little porker weighs in at. I feel like most days he looks chunky, LOVE IT!
As I said in my last post, hug and cherish the ones you love. The world we live in is absolutely crazy.
