A quick update!

I'll have to make this quick as it is really late and I have to get up at 6:30 in the morning to get Alex up and ready to make the school bus! Seth just saw the audiologist yesterday and is doing fantastic. They were measuring his hearing levels at mild to moderate. This wasn't an ABR or anything, just inside the booth while they play sounds and analyze his responses. It's great. Seth is crawling all over the house now and get this, he is starting to climb stairs! Scary! He will also pull up to stand in his crib as well! He wants to be up and moving so much, but he forgets he has to work up the strength to do so. His physical therapist said it best this morning: he's a 15 month baby in a 7 month old body and he wants to be doing so much more than his little body is letting him. It's like a window opened this past month and Seth has gone from baby to almost a toddler. I know Sandra and Sarah will find this hard to believe as he wasn't doing much while they were here. Well, I guess he was dragging himself around on the floor when Sarah was still here. Ok, I will go to bed now.

Assateague Island

Last week we went to Assateague Island, Maryland for one last outing with Ed and Sarah before they left for Japan. We had a lot of fun! We arrived there Thursday evening and set up camp and spent a good part of Friday playing in the water. I wish I had taken so many more pictures! But you just get caught up in the beauty of the beach and water that you forget! Oh, and crossing over the Chesapeake Bay was really cool as well. The bridge was so long! And because of the humidity in the air, you couldn't see the other side of the bridge at first when you get on. We will definately be returning next year. It's only about a three hour drive there. Here are some pics or our outing!

Here is our campsite. We brought along our grill because we had no idea what kind of cooking we'd be allowed to do. We slept in our canopy! It was so cool to have the cool breeze of the ocean blowing on you all night! Unfortunatley I had nightmares all night about the tide rising so high that we would be flooded! Or that it would start raining! Silly!

There are wild horses that roam Assateague Island. You have to keep everything locked up or they will get into it! We had several horses visit us. Here is a pic of one of them trying to kick our box open! Luckily we had it secured under the table bench and he couldn't get in.

Todd firing up the grill to do some dutch oven breakfast cooking!

The kids enjoying lunch on the beach!

My beautiful sister, Sarah, holding Seth and her son, Dallin, sitting next to her.

Todd playing in the water. The next member of Bay Watch? :)

Dallin lost his tooth while eating lunch! We had to get a picture of it!

Enjoying the water!

Seth and I. The weather was very interesting. You could feel the humidity, it was so thick, yet there was always a cool breeze. It was mostly cloudy the whole time, which was nice. We sure loved it! The humidity made my hair a lot more wavy than it usually is. That's how it was in San Antonio as well.

Emily collecting some shells. The small shells that were closed had something living in them, clams perhaps? Anyways, if you set them back down on the wet sand you could see them bury themselves back in! Alex brought a whole bucket of them home, and unfortunatley they all died. He thought he could keep them alive with home-made salt water. Oh well!

Dallin, Kate, Hannah, and Sarah waiting for a wave to come in!

Hanah and Dane got knocked over by this wave! Oh no!

Karsten

Seth enjoying the sand while sitting in his Bumbo that we got at the thrift shop for $2.98! I don't know if the store knew what they were selling, but I grabbed it. He's much too independent to use it now, but I'm sure someone else would love to have it!

He drug himself off the blanket because he couldn't resist the sand!

We were so glad to have Sarah and Ed and children stay with us! We had so much fun! We loved the beach as well! Camping in the sand takes a little getting use to as I'm use to dealing with dirt and not sand. But it wasn't that bad. Plus they had showere to clean the kids up in before we went home. I loved it and hope to do it again next summer as well!

Growing up

So, Kate decided she wanted another perm. She wants to wear it long and curly. So Sarah and I decided to give the spiral wrapping a try. It actually wasn't all that hard, except for the fact that you use a lot of rods! We had fun. I can't believe how old Kate is getting! This will be her last year in elementary school as middle school starts in the sixth grade here in Maryland.

Sure wish Grandpa was around for this!

Dane discovered his top tooth was pretty loose, so he worked on it all evening to get it out. After I had just gone to bed I hear Dane yell to Karsten that he had finally gotten it out! Then he came into my room to show it off.

Coincidently, the same tooth that Dane lost, Seth just got in! And I think we have figured out Seth's fussiness for the past month, excluding teething. Whole milk seems to bother him. His body smells sour and he pukes up a lot. So, we went back to only formula and we are beginning to try out soy milk. We shall see how this goes.

Friends

Ok, for my family who has already seen this, yes, I did steal it from Sarah's site. But I love these pictures so much I just had to post them! This is Alex and his cousin Jacob, both special angels in our families. It's so sweet to see them together!

All's Quiet on the Eastern Front

So, I took Dane in to get a referral for hearing, and they did a simple hearing test, you know, the one where you raise your hand if you hear the tone in your ear, and according to that he hears fine. So, perhaps I'm just a little overly paranoid. Although the doctor did make a few comments that were not true, like a child who has no problem with speech hears just fine. Totally wrong. Anyways, perhaps I'll just let it go and stop worrying. I have noticed that as Dane gets older his mumbling is not as bad and he doesn't say "huh?" as much. Most likely it is nothing.
Last night I spent the night at the hospital with Alex. Who'd of thought that I'd be sleeping at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Weird. He was just having a sleep study done so he can get back on his CPAP machine. And, no doubt, the test showed apnea. No surprise. Already knew this, just needed another sleep study so he could have the correct pressures on his machine. I hate staying at the hospital, espcially if you are NOT the patient becuase your sleeping conditions are even worse! A fold out chair that you cannot fully stretch out on. I guess I know what Todd felt like staying at the hospital with me after I had the children.
Seth seems to be getting so much more aware of his surroundings and doing so many new things. He was in his walker today and watched me go out the kitchen door, go to the garage, and come back in the house. So he heads to the kitchen door and is like running into it trying to figure out how he can get out too! He is so cute!
Alex is at a campout for Scouts with Todd tonight. There is a flash flood watch in effect in the area they are camping. I hope all goes well for them.
We've been having so much fun with Sarah and Ed and their children. It's always great catching up on old times and all, but it's even better when you find their still strong in the gospel! Even more reason to rejoice! Better close for now as I've been up since five a.m. Oh, did I mention we visited the thrift store today? Very fun.

I think I'll side with the Speech Teacher on this one!

Today a Speech Teacher came to visit and do her evaluations on Seth. She is very nice and will be a lot of fun to have around helping to teach us to communicate with Seth. How we'll communicate with Seth is still up in the air as we need to figure out if he's really hearing us or not. His last ABR showed that he has severe to profound hearing loss. With his hearing aids, he'll be able to hear some speech, but not all as hearing aids can only amplify so much. Here's the very encouraging news. She listened to Seth's hearing aids and thought that they weren't set at the right settings. For as little as he can hear, they should be amplifying a lot more than what she was hearing from them. With that being said she also was very surprised at the responses she was getting from him. She commented that with hearing loss as bad as he is suppose to have, he shouldn't be responding the way he does. He has startled several times from unexpected noises in the room! He was sleeping in his swing and Karsten came running in yelling something and Seth startled, in his sleep! I don't think I've ever seen that. And my sister told me tonight that he did the same thing when someone shut the door! We are so excited to see this! And in the speech teacher's opinion, as much as audiologists swear that ABR's are very accurate, she has had clients that out perform what the ABR's are saying. So, we see an audiologist in September and she is going to come with me! I've always felt that Seth could hear better than what the tests were saying, but thought that perhaps it's only wishful thinking. I know he'll never hear perfect, but the more he can hear, the better. Even if we still have to supplement with signing, the more verbal conversation we can get out of him, the better!
On the same hearing note, I'm going to have Dane's hearing tested. Perhaps he is just fine. But the more I've talked to audiologists and speech therapists, the more I wonder if he's got some mild hearing problems. I always thought that it was just who Dane was, his mumbling and his use of the word, "huh?" all the time. I just thought he needed to speak up and pay attention! After finding out that these are signs of hearing loss, I thought it can't hurt just to have him tested. So, we'll see. Tomorrow I go in for a consult with the doctor to have a hearing test ordered. If Dane does have any amount of hearing loss, which I really hope he doesn't, than I'll have all the kids tested, just to be sure. Kate and Karsten I'm not really worried about, but I'd be more suspicious of Emily and perhaps Alex. Anyways, call me paranoid, but oh well.
Alex has a sleep study tomorrow night at Walter Reed. Yippee! I get to sleep in the comfy hospital tomorrow night! I've got a book to read, so that's the only thing I'm looking forward to.
Now, off to the struggle I'm having with Alex's schooling. Argh.