Our Journey to Elizabeth: February 2010

Hello to everyone out there, we know it has been awhile since we have posted any real news or information and thought we should bring you up to date with what is going on in our lives!

As you know, life is busy with an 18 month old-who could have imagined-LOL! Elizabeth is keeping us on our toes with running, jumping, riding her (play) pony, and chasing the dog.

We have had a couple of big milestones in the last few days and thought we would share them with you. First, we spent the weekend in Lakeland with Jennifer's parents and then on Sunday traveled to St. Petersburg and had Elizabeth baptized. Patrick's cousin (well really like a 2nd or 3rd cousin, but it all gets lost in the translation) is a bishop in the episcopal church. He happens to be one of the clergy that married us over 13 years ago. He is now serving the episcopal church in southwest Florida which covers a territory right up to where Jennifer's parents live. So, on Sunday we drove about 45 minutes to the Episcopal cathedral in St. Pete and had Elizabeth baptized with both sets of grandparents, Patrick's brother and 2 of his kids, Jennifer's sister and brother in law and the bishop and his wife and his wife's best friend. It was really special and what a beautiful church to have her baptized in. Elizabeth did great. She was kind of enjoying being held by the bishop and then have her head covered in water. After the actual baptism she was very interested in the baptismal font and probably would have loved to dunk her hands in there. After the baptism we drove a couple of miles down the road and had a nice lunch out on the St Pete Pier.

Then today, Elizabeth started pre pre-school. This is a class that is designed for soon to be 2 year olds to prepare them for pre-school in the fall. You have to be 18 months or older to start this class, so we just made it! There are 3 other kids and Elizabeth had a blast today. She was so excited about her first day that she woke up at 4:45 am ready to go. Her dad and I were not too thrilled with this, but she was able to take a short nap around 7 am to be rested for "school" that started at 8:45 am. The class is called Two and You and one parent stays with the child throughout the class. You work on taking turns, sharing, following directions, playing nice with others and picking up new skills that maybe your child didn't have when starting the class. Elizabeth is the youngest by 6 months so she has some catching up to do, but really enjoyed herself and tried her best to keep up. We will go for a total of 4 classes and if as a group, we decide we want to continue meeting each week, then we will do just that. Official preschool will start in September. We have to decide if we are going to do 2 days a week, 3 days a week or 5 days a week between now and then. I am already leaning towards just 2 days per week (3 hours each day) as Elizabeth will be just barely 2 years old when the preschool starts in September. But we have a couple of weeks to decide what we are going to do for sure. Jennifer was able to attend with her today and then again the next time there is a class, and then Patrick will do the final class.

Elizabeth has also started speech therapy one day per week. We have been having some issues with her eating and meal time taking forever (like 45 minutes to 1 hour EACH meal). The pediatrician was concerned that her weight gain was not enough so between the two issues we had a speech evaluation and she was found to have left sided oral motor weakness. Basically, nothing specific just that her muscles and coordination on the left side are weak. Her right side seemed to check out just fine. We have exercises to do at home and then she actually meets one on one with the therapist once a week and then we have exercises to continue at home in between the sessions. I swear, we had the evaluation and the recommendations were made , and since then she has been eating like a champ with hardly any of the issues we were seeing before the evaluation. However, the therapist made it clear that if we did not address these issues now, she would learn to compensate, but it would eventually catch up in her speech/language development. So, speech therapy it is then. She will eventually work her way up to a group type class where they will work on food textures, which has been her big problem. Textures of certain foods really seem to throw her off, and as a result, she will not chew, or chew some and then spit the food out. We hope and pray that the therapy will help alleviate some of the issues and teach us how to deal with meal time in a positive manner.

Here are some pics of our girl. We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy looking at them. She is such a joy and we just can't imagine life without her!

Until next time.............................................