E.R.

We got home from my parent's house last night and put Andrielle down for bed. About 30 minutes later, we heard her crying in her room. Gavin went up to check on her, filled her sippy with water and came back downstairs. A few minutes later, she was crying again. I went up to check on her this time, thought I saw something on her face and turned on her light. Her whole face, hands, and shirt were covered with blood. I brought her downstairs to check her out and get her cleaned up. Her nose was pouring blood out of both nostrils. I sat her up in her high chair, gave her a snack, and cleaned off most of the blood. We thought she just had just bonked her nose and had a bad bloody nose. But it kept bleeding. I was cleaning her nose off and noticed what I thought was just a yucky booger in her nose and tried to get it out and noticed it was more than that. I called for Gavin to bring me some pliers. He laughed at me and suggested tweezers instead (good idea, Honey). I pulled the thing out of her nose (a rhinestone jewel!!) but there was still something else up there (I was guessing it was the paper backing to the jewel). I tried to get it, but it was too far up and I was concerned I would just shove it up further. So we packed up the kids and headed to the E.R. We got checked in and after a bit of a wait we saw the doctor. He pinned her arms behind her back, swaddled her up in a sheet, had another doctor and two nurses hold my daughter down, and had to suction her still-bleeding nose. The then had to use this thing to pry her nose hole open and then used some alligator pincher thing to get the thing out of her nose. It was a dime-sized white button! Crazy girl. He offered it back to me (no thanks), and gave her a new blankie to take home. Andrielle kept saying "Bye! Bye!" to the nurses and doctors and when they said goodbye to her, she said, "See you soon!" Lol - they laughed and told her they hoped they wouldn't be seeing her soon - haha! And we headed home. By the time we got home it was almost 1 am. Poor Gavin had to go into work today after barely any sleep. I had Andrielle take the day off preschool and we spend the morning watching Disney Junior in bed.

March update

I met with Andrielle's teacher and her O.T. last week to go over some of the goals the O.T. has for Andrielle. I really like Andrielle's therapists, especially her O.T. She's so funny and has some really great ideas for things I can be doing to help Andrielle at home. It was nice spending some time in the classroom with Andrielle. I miss going to Kids Who Count because I don't feel quite as involved as I used to. It was good getting to sit in on her class and just watch her. I've seen so much progress in the past few weeks. She's picked up a lot of new words, can count to 12, and can label a few letters and numbers. It's great seeing her progress.

Andrielle has qualified for the summer preschool program (yay!). She will get to go to 2 days a week for 6 weeks in the middle of the summer. I'm really glad she won't be going all summer without seeing any therapists. She will be staying at East Meadows Elementary for summer school, but we haven't been told yet whether or not Miss Nicole (Mrs. Kemble) will be her teacher, though.

She also gets to stay at East Meadows with Miss Nicole next year and will get 4 days a week (Mon-Thurs). She'll ride the same bus and stay in the same class. I'm really happy about this! I keep feeling like Andrielle is getting special treatment, and it's awesome! Whatever the reason is, I'm not complaining! I'm so grateful for these programs and all that they are doing for my little girl.

Genetic Testing Results

We got a call from Dr. Bennett last night with Andrielle's Genetic testing results. Everything is normal! It was kind of bitter-sweet. Most of me was saying, "Yay, yay, yay!!" but another part was asking, "ok, now what?". I feel like we've exhausted all of our testing options. Everything has come back negative and normal, which is awesome, but leaves me with no answers. I would love to know what it is we're dealing with and what to expect in the future. I guess we just keep doing what we're doing and hope that one day we'll have the answers.

Polar Express party at preschool

Andrielle had a Polar Express Christmas party at preschool last week. She wore pajamas, and Santa even came!

Genetic Test

We just back from the doing the blood work for the genetic testing at the doctor's office. Poor Andrielle just does not like needles (but, really, can you blame her?). Her veins are also really hard to find. They finally found her vein on her left arm and just after they started collecting the blood they needed, her vein collapsed. So they had to use her right arm. Thankfully, they were able to get enough blood from that arm. They're sending in her blood samples and we should have the results back in 2-3 weeks (but it could be a little longer because of the holidays). Hopefully this is the last test we will have to have done for a while.

More testing

I've been in contact with Jeremy Schow, a man who works for Lineagen. Lineagen is the company that does genetic testing. I personally talked with my insurance company and they told me that they didn't cover genetic testing. Jeremy had a conference with them and filed a dispute over it and he won the dispute! They are going to cover the testing! Originally, we were only going to have to do a buccal cell test (the swab inside of the cheek to collect the skin cells), but in order for insurance to cover it, they want to do the blood work test instead and we also have to do a karyotype test (another blood test). I'm not exactly sure what the karyotype test will tell us, I know it has something to do with chromosomes. It looks like we'll be doing this blood draw tomorrow and hopefully it will go well and we'll have the results back soon. Since it's Christmas this week, I'm sure it will take a little longer to get them back, but hopefully it won't take too long!

Preschool

Andrielle started preschool on Monday. She did awesome. She got right on the bus with no problems. I, on the other hand, smiled and waved until the bus was out of sight and then ran back inside and bawled. Then I got Grayden ready and hopped in my car and headed over to the school to spy through the window for a few minutes before I went back home and actually did my workout, got showered/dressed, did the dishes, and even got a short nap in before Andrielle was dropped off.

She had school again today and she was excited to see the bus pull up. She ran right over and climbed in. I'm so proud of her! Now I just need to keep up the motivation to workout while she's gone. We'll see how that goes :)