Kate's Birthday Pics and an Update

Hi Everybody!

I'm trying to figure this blogging thing out for the first time so hopefully it works. Here are some pictures from Kate's 1st birthday. Somehow I got them posted in reverse order. Kate got to have two parties. We celebrated with grandpas, grandmas, aunts, and uncles on Super Bowl Sunday and then we had our own little party on Feb. 5th, her actual birthday. These pics are from Feb. 5th.

Hope you all are doing good. We are doing really well. Matthew is doing great and is entertaining us with all of the new phrases and songs he is picking up. Cody and I have realized how much we really need to watch what we say. He's so much fun. He's quite the helper too and helps with pretty much everything. Potty training is on our "to do" list but that's about as far as it has gotten. He did well for a little while but he now has decided that it's not so cool anymore to use the potty. This could get interesting...

Kate is doing really well too. I haven't been very good about keeping you all informed of how things were going with Kate like I said I would so I thought this would be a good time to give an update. We finally went to see a geneticist last week in Grand Forks. With all of the doctoring we've done with Kate in her first year of life, the one thing that most of the doctors asked us to do was see a geneticist. There is only one in North Dakota and he is in Grand Forks. He travels around the state too but is only coming to Bismarck in June so we decided it was worth making a trip to Grand Forks to see him sooner.

Anyway, we had really good news. He does not see any evidence of any syndromes. He did say he was not completely finished researching everything with her just yet but nothing looked obvious at this point. We were relieved to say the least and have just decided to not worry about that anymore unless we hear differently. There were two particular syndromes associated with hearing loss that I was really worried about but he basically said she didn't have any signs fitting the description for those so that was great news.

The other thing he told us that we didn't expect to hear was that she may not have the hemihypertrophy that some doctors were thinking she has. Hemihypertrophy is where one side of the body is larger than the other and there were definite signs of that in her legs. However, this doctor did a lot of measurements and said that parts of her body were assymetric (aren't we all??!!) but it was not consistently on one side or the other. That would be awesome news too as it would mean she may not be at such a high risk for childhood tumors and we could possibly stop doing the quarterly ultrasounds of her liver and kidneys that we are currently doing. The reason for the ultrasounds is that kids with hemihypertrophy are more at risk for a Wilm's tumor that could develop in their kidneys and another tumor (I forget the name) that could develop in the liver. We were told to continue the ultrasounds for at least a couple more years to be safe and just follow up on whether anything has changed in the growth of her body. If nothing is changing, then we could stop the ultrasounds.

Aside from that stuff, Kate is a perfectly healthy and happy little girl who is sooo close to walking but just not quite there yet. She takes a couple steps on her own so I'm thinking she'll take off any day now. She has a lot of attitude and I mean a lot! She has no problem bullying her brother around already and she pretty much runs the household. She is such a blessing!

I think that sums the latest news up. Hopefully it all makes sense. I also want to say "Thank You" to all of you for the love and support you've sent our way. It has meant so much! I'll try to be better about keeping you informed of what's going on. I miss you all. Take care.

Love,

Christy