Standing By Ourselves???

Can you believe it? Kalista standing up without holding on to anything. She has made some huge strides in the past two weeks. We saw her teacher today and she said the same thing. It's cute since some poses she squats like a sumo wrestler and other times it's so grown up like. Our baby is turning into a little girl!


What have we been up to since our last post? Hmmm....plenty of doctor appointments. We spent the past three days visiting Rady Children's for all of Kalista's appointments. It kinda felt like the movie "Groundhog Day"....we wake up...get ready....head to Rady's...come home...feed Kalista a few times...go to bed and then it starts all over again. So here are the latest specialist/doctor updates:

Nutrition:
Yahoo...we got samples. We are about to start Peptamen Junior as her new meal mixed with breastmilk this weekend. That means Jen still needs to pump for another few more months ("Maybe"....says Jen). The great part about all this is that we don't have to feed Kalista as often since it packs in a whopping 30 calories per an ounce (compared to breastmilk of 20 calories). This means we can spread out our meal times farther apart to encourage Kali to get hungry enough to try new things by mouth. We'll see how it goes as we do a trial run.

Cardiology:
Kalista made it through her sedated echocardiogram yesterday and she did fabulous for the hour long procedure (...and she did look like Sleeping Beauty by the way). The echo technician said that everything looked great, but we get the final results from Dr. Perry on Monday. Kalista was not a happy camper since the sedative weakened all her muscle tone. She ended up being one floppy gal for about four hours after we got home. You can tell that she wanted to play and stand...but her legs kept giving out on her. Poor thing!!!

Occupational therapy/Feeding therapy:
Um yah...not much there to update all of you on.....fresh fruit smoothies and keep working on what we have been doing. We got the suggestion to try seaweed since Kalista likes the texture of paper. How Asian is that? Too bad she can't have rice and raw fish with it...mmmm...Sushi.

It has been a truly busy week and we still have Friday to go. We are so glad this is going to be a low key weekend. We are in the midst of planning a big birthday party for some little person we know and would love to finish tying up all the loose ends this coming weekend. Whew!