Crawling

Linc is pretty content to just sit and babble and play with his feet most of the time, so it is difficult to get him to practice his crawling skill. But I finally got a video of him doing it!

Now I will just have to get his therapists to check out our blog for proof that he is able to crawl when he really wants to!

Neuro Update

Well things are trucking along here. Lincoln is now 10 months old! I can't believe how fast he is growing. Soon he will be 10 years old, and I won't know where all the time has gone!

He had an appointment with the neurologist last week. It seems that the long EEG showed that the seizures are coming from the Occipital lobe on the left side (back left). This is different than previously thought, because we thought that they were coming from the back of the frontal lobe. The occipital lobe is known to control vision, the frontal lobe controls speech. So, we may expect some right side periphrial vision loss in the future, because as these seizures continue they damage the tissue. But, this may be good news when it comes to speech development in the future.

Another interesting thing is that the neuro said that periphrial vision is only most important when driving, and that he could compensate by turning his head. The doctor made it sound like Lincoln might drive someday! This is a suprise to me, because I had pretty much thought that there was no hope for something that advanced from him.

We started a new medication called Trileptal. This is a med that focuses on focal seizures. But the main side effect is that it can increase Infantile Spasms. Well this is okay if the focal seizures are brought under control, because the Infantile Spasms are triggered by the focal seizures. So the theory is no focal seizures = no Infantile Spams.

We started to taper the Topamax, from 6 pills a day, down to 4 a day. The neuro wanted to completely taper the Topamax to nothing, but that worried me, because the Infantile Spasms were brought under control with the Topamax in mid-April. So after talking with the doctor, we decided to try to taper the Vigabatrin instead, and leave the Topamax at 4 pills a day, unless we noticed some changes.

Well...yesterday I noticed some changes. He started to have seizures that looked like Infantile Spasms again. It is difficult to tell for certain because his focal seizures look like a quick rythmic head nod, and the Infantile Spasms look like a slower rythmed head drop...but they both have varying degrees of severity depending on the episode. So I called the neuro just in case, and we upped to Topamax back to 6 pills a day, we know that he can handle that dosage okay, so it is no big deal even if what I was seeing were not Infantile Spasms. Once we get to our theraputic level of Trileptal we will see if the focal seizures are under control. If not we will try something else.
Today we had our weekly physical therapy appointment and the PT said that he has everything he needs to crawl, he just has to put it together. He has been doing some crawling these past few days, but he is so long that he can stretch out to get much of what he wants without moving too far. The farthest he has crawled is about 3 feet. I have a feeling that he will be crawling much farther before he is 11 months old. **crosses fingers**

We also had our speech evaluation today for speech therapy. Unfortunately he had a seizure half way through, so that made him cranky and out-of-sorts. But, he did pretty well, and showed off the sounds that he has been making recently. She seemed to think that he was doing okay. A little delayed, but not huge at this point in time. She gave us a few pointers and is going to come back in 1 month to see how he is doing.

Anyway, that is about all that is going on for now.

Now for the pictures!

This is one of Linc's favorite games: standing! He tries to stand on his own, but needs some help getting his 28lb 8oz off the floor. Once he is standing and leaning against the couch he can be pretty stable. Of course he fell (but didn't hurt himself) right after I snapped this picture. I am usually and sitting right behind him while he plays like this.

Here he is trying to climb up Andy's leg. He likes to reach up, but can't quite get the grip right to support himself. He thinks if he pulls hard enough he can do it without using his legs. Silly boy.

So so close! Here is a video from about a week or two ago. He is actually doing even better with the crawling than in this video. I can never capture his good crawling episodes on video though. I will get one as they get more frequent and longer.

Happy Mother's Day

Andy had told me earlier in the week that he awsn't going to do anything for me for Mother's Day. Honestly, that didn't really suprise me since we rarely do much if anything for our Anniversary, or Valentines' Day. I was a little dissapointed since it is my very first Mother's Day, but I just told him that I would save them all up for some nice birthstone jewlery someday.
Well, lo and behold. This is what Lincoln was holding all wrapped up in a pretty box on Sunday morning...

Isn't that pretty? The center diamond is going to be replaced with a ruby, Linc' birthstone. This was all Andy's idea, and he had decided on this before I ever said anything about birthstone jewlery to him. Isn't he the nicest guy? I am so lucky to have these two wonderful guys in my life. Here they are. Linc likes to practice his computing skills while we are looking at the internet.

Here is Lincoln from about a week ago.

Here is Lincoln from after this morning's nap. He is growing up so quickly. It is hard to believe that my baby is going to be a 10 month old little boy in just over a week!

I hope everyone had a happy Mother's Day and a good weekend!

Follow up on our announcement.

There will be no New Years' baby. No brother or sister for Lincoln for Christmas. So much for the power of positive thinking, huh? I guess we should have known better. This is miscarriage #2 for us. At least this one was over early though.

For anyone who does not know our history. We have been pregnant 3 times. The first time it ended in miscarriage at 18 weeks. The second pregnancy was Lincoln. And this is the third pregnancy, ending in miscarriage at 5 weeks. Not the best track record.

Sigh.

Maybe we will get it right the next time.

Hospital Update

Well we got out of the hospital yesterday. Things went pretty well. Linc did awesome. He is such a good, sweet, patient little boy. He handled being cooped up better than his parents did.

The doctors didn't learn much from the EEG however, so that is a dissapointment. The seizures are still originating in the left hemishpere, but cannot be pinpointed to a certain lobe, let alone a certain tuber within a lobe. We had a CT scan to try to see if there were any calcium deposits, which can often indicate seizure activity in that region. I haven't heard back about this, but I doubt it would really make a difference in our course of action. Dr. T said that we are not good candidates for epilepsy surgery at this point in time, and that we are going to continue with the medication route. He did say that Linc is not having Infantile Spasms any longer, so this is a very good thing. He seems to think that the Topamax most likely was responsible for this, and that possibly increasing the dosage again, that the focal seizures may come under control as well. We can hope. Even if this is not the case, there are still some more options for different drugs. And maybe down the road, as Linc's brain grows and develops, we will be able to "see" things a bit more clearly on the EEG.

He are some pics of our brave little trooper:

And in other news. Check out Linc's new t-shirt...and the new ticker in the side bar. That is right. We are expecting again. Although there is a ton of time between now and January, and we know that just about anything and everything can go wrong between now and then, we decided that there was really no good reason to not go ahead and share the good news now. If, god forbid, something bad were to happen, that event would not be kept a secret, and you all would find out about it anyway. So we would rather share our happiness now, and hope, pray, and plan for the positive outcome here!

Lincoln approves. He is giving us the thumbs-up!

Update from the cutest baby in So.AZ!

Things are going pretty well. The weather is nice, so we have been going outside a lot more. We bought a pool one 85+ degree weekend, but since then it has cooled back down to the 70's. Not to worry...we will be seeing 100+ weather in just a few more weeks. I am certain that we will get our money's worth out of that pool! I will post a picture of the pool-time fun as soon as it happens!

I don't know if I have posted this, but as of the beginning of April, Lincoln weighed in at 28lbs 10oz! Go ACTH treatment!! That is a whopping ~4lb weight gain in 5 weeks. Well, actually this is not that unusual for Linc, almost every month of his life he has gained ~3lbs, except that he had only gained 6oz the previous month, so we were hoping that his weight gain was tapering off.

Lincoln has caught the second cold of his life this past week (the first cold was following his first hospital stay back in September). He has a runny nose, a terrible cough (sometimes he coughs so hard he throws-up), and a low-grade fever (never higher than 102 degrees) that we have been treating with tylenol. All he wants to do was sleep and cry. It is a bummer because next week we will be stuck indoors in the hospital all.week.long. One thing that was interesting is that I did not notice an increase in seizure activity due to his fever...which if you might remember after his 6 month immunizations, he had a rough night of about 20 seizures in a couple of hours. So this was a good thing at least! In fact...after increasing his Topamax dosage to 50mg in the am and 50mg in the pm last Saturday, Andy and I have not noticed any Infantile Spasms since Monday, and we noticed a significant reduction in the other types of seizures. Now we are hoping that this improvement is due to the medication, and not due to the cold (wouldn't that be weird?) that he is just now starting to get better from.

We have a fun weekend coming up. We are planning on getting out of the house as much as possible since we will be vacationing at TMC all of next week for our 4 day video EEG. We are going to go to a friends' birthday bash on Saturday, and then hit the dirt for some fun Jeeping on Sunday. Wish us luck, rest, and sanity during our hospital stay next week.

Here are some pictures from the last few weeks. Enjoy!

We won!

Lincoln is now officially the cutest baby in southern Arizona! Just like we always thought, of course!! ;)

Thank you so much for all of your voting support! We couldn't have done it without all of the people who love Linc so much!