March for Babies

Support the March of Dimes: March for Babies!!

You can read about last year's walk here.

Spring Break and Easter

Karsie has taken to drawing... a lot... all over everything. She took a pen and pad of paper into her ball pit/tent and did some art work.

We have been spending some time at the local "zoo" lately... and Karsie and friend Owen like to check out all the animals together.

Here they are showing us where to go next.

At the San Diego Zoo, Karsie enjoyed going on the slide! She LOVES to play at parks.

Checking out her Easter basket goodies from Nana and Papa. Thank you!

Egg dying... Karsie was a bit confused about how the whole thing worked.

She ended up wearing half the green dye...

Checking out the finished eggs... she enjoyed taking them out, smashing them on the table, and putting them back into the container. Very fun!

Still confused... we are always asking her to eat eggs... so here, she is trying them with the shell on!

Happy Easter!

He is risen!

He is risen, indeed!

Surgery Appointments

Karsie had her surgery appointment today. There's good news. There's also interesting news.

The good news: Karsie is now big enough to accept the tissue expanders, and unless something happens to the surgeon, she will have her surgery in June.

The interesting news: Something happened to the surgeon. She is pregnant! And she's due in July, which puts a wrench in pretty much all our plans. How dare she!

So, the plan is that she will have her surgery in October. The bad news with that is that it's almost four months longer to wait than our original plan. However, the good news with that is that she has four months to grow, and the surgeon still thinks Karsie will be ready for closure surgery around Christmas time or a little after. Plus, Dr. Gosman endorses compression wrapping. So, we're trying that again...for the third time. So far so good. The hope is that the wrapping will make the tissue expansion easier or (best case scenerio) not necessary.

So, here's our plan: October 6th we will be going in for a pre-op. Then, on the 13th we will go in for surgery to put in the expanders. Then, for one month, nothing will happen as Karsie recovers from surgery. Next, for about 6 weeks we will be expanding her tissue. Finally, she will have a few weeks of resting while the expanders are staying the same size, and then she will have a closure surgery. Depending on how everything is, she will either have it completely closed, which would be great, but probably unlikely. If they can't get all the muscle over and closed, she will have a patch put over to connect the two sides and later she will have another surgery to repair that, which will be just like a normal hernia surgery. Either way, we should be mostly done with all of this this time next year. The hernia surgery would probably be a couple years after the closure surgery.

So, here's to a clear summer for us. Congratulations Dr. Gosman!

I Love My Papa

Updates... and Dress-Up Day!

Updates... scroll down for the pics...

Last trip to the GI docs was a good (and short!) visit. Karsie weighed in at 21lbs and not quite 32 inches long. Her growth continues to be good on the Boost Kids 1.5. Her site is off and on yeasty, and we have come to accept that she will probably struggle with the yeast and leakage as long as she has the large belly. The wonderful NP asked if we were comfortable to just limp along with the leaking and yeast until we can get through surgery (hopefully early summer and Christmas)... and then with a flat tummy, the GI docs can really tackle the feeding issues. We are okay now that we know that is the plan.

In other health news, we seemed to miss the sick season that took out most our friends kids in the middle of winter... instead we have been plagued by sickness the last month. Karsie has had another bout of ear-infections/colds/coughs... and we have both caught some of it as well. Antibiotics have been our friends, and Karsie is the only one to have avoided a shot of penicillin (OUCH!). We haven't been able to get her last set of immunizations, as we have been waiting for a 10 day window of health before taking her in... she seems to get right to 9/10 day mark and then get sick again. She might be scheming all this just to avoid her shots.

We are gearing up for our spring break... and Karsie's appointment with the plastic surgeon. We are hoping that Dr. Saenz will be able to make it to that appointment as well (or at least to see him within the same week). We will also be doing the March of Dimes: March for Babies this month... and are happy to be supporting that cause! There will be another post later with how you can support them as well!

Karsie's hair is now long enough to put it into piggys!

SO SWEET!

Look at that precious girl!

Playing "I-Spy" with her toddler word-book.

Heading out with Mickey... just look at that cute piggy!!

"Look mom, I found all my 'bracelets'!"