We're Chomping

We have some breakthroughs in Kalista's feeding adventures!!!

She is very proud that she can take down a slice of cheese now with ease. As she will tell you...it makes her tummy happy. She is also able to drink a few ounces of whole milk now with her meals, but with a little prompting from the grownups.

We also started a new group feeding therapy program this week, so we hope all these little girls who are weaning off their feeding tubes are going to rub off some positive eating juju. We'll let you know.

The Summer Finale

It's September already and the summer has come to an end.

We just returned from a short trip to the Bay Area over the Labor Day weekend.  Matt's mom celebrated her retirement with a big party, Kalista started her first day of school last week and Bella had a blast at the doggie hotel.

Grandma Evelyn's retirement bash at the Cliff House

 Bella enjoying playtime and making new friends at the pet resort

We got this emailed to us from the pet resort on Labor Day...Bella is too cute!

 Kali enjoying her last few days of summer vacation before her first day of school

Kalista also sat on the airplane for the first time over this past holiday weekend.  She did a great job on both flights.  She said "whoa whoa whoa" upon take off and then slept for the remainder of the flight. Whew...we were so glad that we did not end up a victim of those crying kid airplane stories.  She did a great job!

Here are a few pictures from our trip up north visiting friends and family:

 Having dinner with Great-Grandma (Jen's Grandma)

 Hanging out with Great-Grandpa (Matt's Grandpa)

Kali borrowed Auntie Jeanette's Barbie mobile with Grandpa's help

 Kali had to show off her new bathing suit. It hides her belly bump well!

 Enjoying pool time with dada

 Poolside party with the cousins

Because we haven't updated our blog over the past few months, we have plenty to talk about now.  Kalista is growing leaps and bounds.  Her speech and vocabulary has expanded and she talks non-stop.  her new favorite phrase is: "What is.....????"  So she asks us all the time: "What is a bird?  What is Brobee?  What is Muno? What is dada? "  Kali is still a big lover of Yo Gabba Gabba and asks about Brobee and Muno on a daily basis.

Bella has adjusted to life without Joey and is enjoying all the attention she gets from all of us in the house. She loves cuddling with Kali and I think the feeling is mutual from Kalista too. We will sometimes find Kali laying on Bella as if she was a pillow.

 Summer chalk art classes for Bella - Kali is a good teacher!

 Mastered the pursed lips pose for blowing bubbles

Enjoying plenty of time outdoors

We just celebrated our five year anniversary and will celebrate the monumental milestone in the next few weeks while we are on a long vacation.  Matt is working hard at the Marriott still, but Jen has decided to leave private practice after almost 7 years to join the optometry team at Sharp Rees-Stealy, a larger medical practice, as their pediatric specialist mid-October. It has been exciting news and a big change!

Update on Kali's medical status: We have been placed on hold from any surgeries until we wean her 100% off her g-tube.  Which might be a good thing since she is so petite.  We have seen the GI department and our nutrition team quite a bit over the summer because we were not gaining weight as quickly as we should have.  With a little adjustment in the calories and quantity of tube feedings, we are back on the growth chart with good progress. We had to bump back up to Boost 1.5 formula with some extra calories from Duocal, but we broke the 20 pound mark FINALLY sometime in mid-August.  Yay!! 

We have a feeding team evaluation coming up in the next month and a half to assess where we are and figure out our next plan since we are at a standstill with oral feeds again. Kali will get hungry...stuff food in her mouth....but won't swallow it and then gets frustrated and taps her belly for her tube feeding. She is too smart for her own good!  

We are just blessed that she is doing well overall and growing into such a little woman.

December Already??

Hi everyone! I can't believe that November has came and went. Sorry for the lack of post entries last month.

Well...after Halloween came and went,it was only a few weeks before Jen's family came into town for Thanksgiving. It has been awhile since Grandpa Greg and Uncle Bill saw Kali over the summer so they were anxious to come visit. Grandma Susan was just down in October for a two week stay. Kalista has a good memory; she knew it was Grandma as soon as she saw her.

For pre- Thanksgiving dinner, Jen made her first turkey on the stove top. Yes...stove top. We invested in a cookware system called Saladmaster. It's a waterless and oil-less method of cooking and essentially uses a pressure cooking method to cook your food. So we threw a 12 pound turkey on the stove, added some vegetables and let it go for about 3 to 4 hours. We'll just say it was so tender that the meat started falling off the bone. Mmmmmm good!

Ironically, we spent Thanskgiving evening at a restaurant. We had dinner at Soleil@K in the Gaslamp since they have a wonderful buffet spread. We definitely enjoyed the endless supply of turkey and prime rib with all the fixings. Yum!

During our Thanksgiving week, we finally got a chance to meet up with Karsie Gene. She is one of Kalista's baby "O" friends. It was the first time we all met each other in person. We have been following each other's blogs for awhile and emailing back and forth. It has been so great being able to share our stories and our journey with each other.

We set up a play date/food date while they were in town to see if Karsie would rub off some good foodie vibes. We thought it would be such a positive experience to see another little girl, just like Kalista, eat yummy things like hash browns and scrambled eggs. And you know...we have to thank Karsie and her family because Kalista is now on this food kick. She started drinking "Icy Water" (watered down whole milk) in place of just plain water and today she ate 12 graduate puffs in a row. Not bad in one week's time! She has also accepted Fruit Loops into her repertoire of foods. We couldn't be happier! 12 sweet potato puffs...in a row....that's a record!

Kali at the park with her friend

As we transition into December, we have sadly caught this wicked little cold that has plagued everyone around us. We think this early Christmas present was sent to us by mistake. This time the grownups got hit harder than Kalista. Last time she got sick...it was a nice trip to the ER...times two. This time she got the sniffles for a few days, but seems to be doing fine right now running around the house. She is the only who got the flu shot this season..so maybe that helped. Hopefully, we can all rest up this weekend and be back to good health by next week.

I feel good.....let's conga!

Teething Woes

We started off the week with Kalista's one year pediatrician appointment for her S-H-O-T-S. We suppose from this point on, we will be spelling out key words to protect Kalista's little ears. So needless to say, she got her infamous vaccinations. As usual, she was fine throughout it all.

Oh my, those little teeth are sharp!! Kalista is teething and trying to put everything in her mouth. As you can tell in this picture below, she is trying to eat our furniture since her teething biscuit didn't do the trick.


Putting Orajel on her gums has been tricky since she will take a bite of you with her new pearly whites on the bottom. And like we've said before...those two little things are sharp! We LOVE the nighttime strength Orajel since it is a blessing. Kalista no longer wakes up in the middle of the early morning crying from the pain. Those three o'clock morning wake ups seem to make mom an ogre beast for the rest of the day. Watch out Shrek!



The positive thing about teething is her increased her appetite to gnaw on almost anything. Healthy foods are obviously not on that list.....except carrot sticks. That apparently is still the exception to the rule.


Now that she can make decisions, she will often take her non-favorite foods and feed them to the dogs. She will either drop them over her high chair and look down to see if Joey and Bella will fight for it or she will sneak it under her tray so they can come up and get it from her. When we catch her in the act, she gives us this look. It is exactly the one you see above in the picture--we call it the "who me?" look.

We have good news! Kalista's teacher, Jodi, came early this week along with Linda, the school speech and language therapist. She told us that Kalista is on track with her speech and language development, even though she has not been getting the same oral input (meaning eating, sucking, swallowing) as her peers. That was very reassuring to know, since research has been shown that non-oral experience can delay speech development in some kids. We knew Kalista was going to be a chatter box someday.



We had our OT/feeding therapy this morning and we have found a common thread in everything that Kalista likes to "eat". They all seem to be solid and very flavorful. She loves the taste of Doritos Nacho Cheese chips, pretzel sticks, Veggie Stix and Fruit-by-the-Foot (since it is attached to paper). We know it all sounds like junk food, but we are happy that she puts any food into her mouth. Earlier this evening, Kalista decided to venture into uncommon area and accepted baby corn back into her circle of trust and honeydew for the first time. We also noticed that if we use "adult" utensils instead of her own cute, bright colored plastic kid version, then she is more willing to try. What a D-I-V-A!

Our OT and probably parents across the world would cringe at the sight of the next few pictures. We really are not raising a junk food addict, but it was too funny not to capture it on camera.

It has been a long discussion in OT about Kalista not wanting to drink from all five different sippy cups that we have for her. They all have something different about them: sippy lip/no sippy lip, silicone/plastic, handle/no handle...you get it. We've even tried cold, ice cold, room temperature and warm beverages with no success. So...it just so happened that we had just finished drinking a can of soda and rested the can on the coffee table. Our little protester of sippy cups decides to cruise herself over to the table, takes the empty soda can and tries it out for herself. Yah....explain that one!

(Um yeah...no endorsements here...right?)

The funny thing is that it looks like she has mastered the art of drinking from a can.

Let Me Try It

Kalista had a few visitors this past weekend, Grandma Susan (Por Por) and Uncle Bill (Kau-Fu). It didn't take long before she warmed up to them and remembered who they were. She was spoiled again for another few days with constant attention and being held in everyone's arms. Kalista showed them her new talents of standing up with a little assistance and the start of crawling.

Kalista is looking more like a little girl now with Grandma

Speaking of standing and crawling....we saw Tami, Kali's physical therapist, this week and we have been challenged to work on getting her crawling and standing up on our own. For the past few days, Kalista is getting better at pulling herself up to a stand and has taken on getting into crawling stance on her own (which is a big step for her). Every little day we are learning something new.

We even saw the neurologist, Dr. Mehl, this week for our routine developmental milestone check up. We found out the size of Matt's head circumference at this visit since they measured Jen's at the very first office visit. It is to get a sense of what Kali's head size should be. After a few peeks with his scope and a few taps with the reflex hammer, Dr. Mehl told us that Kalista has a "good brain" and that we don't have to see him again until six months from now.

Bleh....that plum is so tart!

I love paper products

Kalista has taken on to touching and mouthing everything, except food of course. Well, we take that back, she does have a select amount of "allowed" foods that go in her mouth. Today, she took on licking a plum, gumming Baby Mum Mum rice crackers and mouthing her favorite vegetable item, carrot sticks. Baby foods and purees have not been a big hit lately for some reason. Besides that, she loves to suck on paper and all sorts of items that don't seem threatening to her.

You could be the next one I call...

She is definitely a kiddo of the future. Her favorite items happen to be electronic products ranging from the laptop computer and remote control to our cell phones. She seems to know how to text and IM folks too. Her little thumbs come out and dance around the keyboard. Her messages look like this most of the time: "qoeieieo....skakalaskfjalsi ....afalsifhoaiw" and on some occasions they get sent to some lucky friend/family member. So you may be next lucky person to get a message directly from Kalista.

Little Feeders Here We Come!

Field trips can be exhausting for Kalista

We had our OT evaluation with Molly over at Rady Children's this morning. It looks like we have been approved to move on to the Little Steps for Feeders therapy group to help Kalista transition from her G-tube to eating by mouth. It was pretty reassuring that what we have been doing at home (oral stim and taste testing) with Kalista has been bang on target with what they suggest. We just need to add in a few bubble blowing sessions and water play and then that'll top the list.

Kalista's PJs are getting too small

We both had the day off and did some cleaning since we have guests heading into town this weekend. We also did some cleaning in the nursery and realized our baby doesn't fit her 3 month sized PJs anymore. It was bittersweet since those were the outfits she wore in the NICU (some of you may remember the blue one with pandas, the little fuzzy ducks and the ruffle butt car PJs). It is true, babies grow so fast out of their clothes. Goodbye 3 months....Hello 6 months!!

Hanging out with Joey after a long day

Now that Kalista is getting older and bigger, she can now hold her own around the dogs. Joey still likes to come up and lick her toes...but she just nudges him with her foot and he moves away. For all of our sakes, he has never been a face licker unlike Bella (Thank goodness!!). We can only handle one face lickin' dog in the house. Kalista likes to babble at the dogs and they just stare at her with puzzled looks....waiting for a word that makes sense..like "treats".

New Meal Plan

Looks like we are starting a new feeding regimen. The fundoplication surgery has left Kalista with a smaller stomach than before. So, we have changed our plan and are feeding Kalista on continuous mode to get her stomach stretched back to its initial size. This means she is fed all day. We started yesterday at 17 mL/hour and increasing 1 mL every 6 hours until we reach 33 mL/hour. Prior to surgery, Kalista was at 45 mL/hour. So, this should be no problem for her!

Kalista's medical team has recommended this feeding program because she showed some signs of irritability after her feedings two days ago and it may have been a little too much for her to handle. When Kalista comes home, it looks like she will be fed continuously overnight and throughout the day, fed in multiple hour increments, known as bolus feeds. It's not set in stone yet, but whatever the final plan is...we will make it work. When we get discharged, someday soon, we will also be enrolled in the Little Eaters Club to work on her oral aversion issues and get her eating by mouth again. Can't wait to meet other babies!