Keeping up with Fred-n-Sara

I’m going to try to start something new here.  I have wanted to start posting more often, so I’m going to start a schedule.  Starting with today (and every Monday from now on, unless some unforeseeable circumstance prohibits me from continuing…), Monday’s will be my week in review; a summary/reflection of a week at Fred-n-Sara’s house with all our adventures and mishaps (yep, that’s right, no matter what Fred says, we are not perfect!).  I’ll tell you about the other weekly ideas I have as the days come up, however, I will not be posting every day.  I don’t have time for all that (I do have a infant-going-on-toddler you know!), but there will hopefully be a few posts a week from now on.  So here goes the first week in review!

Last week was Calvin’s eye surgery.  I made a post about it, which you can check out here.  He is doing extremely well (as you can tell in the picture to the left), his eyes are not crossing when he wears his glasses any more (which is all that matters, according to the opthamologist).  However, he may still require another surgery or two (the average child in Calvin’s position requires 3 surgeries), but for now we are happy with the results.

Late this week Calvin has become pretty proficient at pulling himself up on furniture.  He is now even starting to “walk” across the coffee table to reach his beloved drink coasters (he chews on them like cookies!) or remote controls (he even turned on the tv one day, startling himself).  By the way, the standing picture is a pre-surgery picture.  We also learned that he doesn’t like the new kiddie pool we got him.  He loves his bath tub and will play in there for hours, but he is not having the pool.  Yet, we’ll keep working on that!

On Friday Fred and I took a trip to Seville, for the annual community garage sales (it’s a huge event and I love going!) only to find out that we had the wrong dates…it’s this coming weekend instead.  After some choice words that aren’t worth repeating we decided to make the best of the day, since Calvin was at the babysitter’s.  We headed over to Babies R Us and got everything we needed to babyproof the house.  Fred worked hard all afternoon Friday and most of Saturday making our house safe for Calvin now that he’s getting into everything (yes, he even loves the dog food).  Then on Saturday we hit a few rummage and garage sales and got a few good deals.  Fred was thrilled to find not one but two working original Nintendo game systems.  He made a post about his finds on his other site, here.

Last, yesterday was my youngest sister’s birthday party, so we spent the evening celebrating with them.  Her actual birthday is today.  Happy birthday Katherine!

Calvin’s eye surgery was yesterday, overall, everything went pretty well. I think the process was harder on Fred and I than our little guy!

We got to the hospital at 5:30 a.m. and were seen by a bunch of people. Cal was really good, considering we couldn’t feed him (and he hadn’t eaten since I gave him his night bottle at about 8:30 the night before), he didn’t fuss at all, but by 7 a.m. (surgery was scheduled for 7:30), he was getting tired. So we met with all the doctors, including the anesthesiologists (3 of them) and our eye dr and then this nurse. Now this was the worst part…the nurse came in, said she was going to take Cal back for surgery. We said ok, then she whisked him off, no goodbyes, no explanation as to where we should wait. This is when I freaked out and started crying a bit. But one of the volunteer ladies at the waiting room desk explained that the surgery would be short and showed us where to wait. A little less than an hour later, the dr came out and told us everything went well.

Then Melissa, a friend of ours, who is a child life specialist showed up (which was a great surprise, thanks Melissa!) she checked on Calvin and took us back to see him. Here I started crying again. My poor boy was crying and he sounded like a frog because of the tube he had down his throat. But I was allowed to pick him up and hold him, so that was nice. He calmed down quickly and pretty much slept for the next hour and a half until we were given the ok to leave.

Before we gave him some pedialite to drink, which he kept down, and since then I’ve given him a bottle and a graham cracker. No upset tummy yet. He also slept for 3 hours after we got home (so did Fred and I, we are not early morning people!). He is still a little fussy today even, but doesn’t seem to have any pain in his eye, he’s just extra tired.

Cal’s eye looks good, we have a post op appointment later today with the dr, so we’ll see what he says.  I’m not going to get my hopes up, but I’d love for him to say that Calvin won’t need another surgery.  I’m sure the first time is the most difficult, but it was heartbreaking to see my little guy go through that!  I thank God every day for having such a healthy child and family, I couldn’t imagine having to go through anything more than this easy procedure.

An update:

The doctor said that Cal’s eyes couldn’t look better!  He doesn’t have to wear the patch for as long now and doesn’t have to go back to the eye doctor for 2 months (we’d been going almost every two weeks recently).  There’s no guarantee at this point that Cal won’t  need another surgery, but we are very happy that things have turned out this well.  Cal’s eye is not crossing at all now!