Coburn Kids

Things have been crazy!  Daniel and I have been have been working like mad on so many projects.  We’ve gotten the front yard in shape, I bought and painted some trim for the garden area, we pulled weeds, laid mulch, pruned and more. We were set to start on the backyard then it snowed for a few days so we moved inside.

We’ve gotten the paperwork from Gena’s school, and her last day was yesterday.  She was off track starting this week. We’ve arranged for Adessa to have her VIP day at preschool and her last day is April 8th.

April 2nd-5th Daniel and I will be out in Illinois to search for housing, because April 11th we pack the truck and April 13th we move!  Crazy, I know. We’ve all ready contacted the properties we are interested in, setting up dates to see the home. Flights/hotels/rental car are all done and covered. Moving truck ordered.  My Mom is going to be able to drive out with us, which is fabulous (thank you mom!).  My Dad is flying out that Thursday we move to help.  Then they will both fly home on Sunday.

We’ve got the carpet ordered for this house, have started spring cleaning all the toys, clothes, and more. I got Caden’s last Dr.’s appointment scheduled for April 6th. We’ve started pawning off the furniture we can’t bring with us as well!

Everything is happening fast but I love it. I thrive in this fast paced planning stage, I go “control freak” on everyone.  Okay, maybe not lovely for my family who has to deal with me but I’m thorough and I know I have all the bases covered… I swear!!

The Draper Temple dedication is now done and over with. Daniel and I brought the kids and went with my parents to walk through the temple a few weeks back. Gena and Adessa were so thrilled to go! They loved it. They asked lots of questions and were just generally enthused to see it and how beautiful it was. My Mom and Dad also came up this last Sunday to watch the kids so that Daniel and I could go to the dedicatory services for it. Again, wonderful and so special. We were there an hour before it began in our Stake Center and still sat in the overflow, but that hour before was so quiet and peaceful. I forget sometimes with 3 kids running around how valuable and precious that much quiet time can be! So I sat and meditated on life, on my children, on the gospel and about my wonderful husband.

In extremely exciting news, after 5 months we now have an official job offer and we’ve accepted! It is out of state but we are blessed because we will get to be near family still, which is invaluable to us. So come mid-April we are packing up the family and headed to Chicago, IL. Daniel has a great new job with Sears and I can’t tell you how grateful and enthused we are about it. The fact that we will have good health insurance again also brings a smile.

Of course, the coordination of the move wipes that smile right off!! I have to now get in place all of Caden’s new doctors and reschedule all his upcoming appointments. We’ll be able to do his Swallow Study here in Salt Lake but his ophthalmology, cardiology, ENT, GI doctor, geneticist, therapists, preemie clinic, cleft clinic, and all other appointments we had upcoming here now have to be redone. Which is a very daunting task. Not to mention getting Gena into her new school and all the fun moving things such as utilities and the like. I’m up for it though.

It’s exciting and scary to move all at the same time. You get comfortable in a place after a few years. You settle in, everything becomes familiar. There’s a pattern and a rhythm that life develops. Then you have to uproot and everything is new, different, and you feel out of place for a bit. I’m teaching the girls that this is a new adventure for us. One chapter of our lives closing and a new one beginning. It’s hard to leave so much behind though. Family, friends, a fantastic ward who has helped us out in ways I can’t even begin to thank them. The mountains… I’ll miss the mountains. But we have new experiences and opportunities before us and I acknowledge and realize just how lucky we are to get this great job offer. Times are hard and scary, so to have that bit of stability back in our lives is something I am grateful for.

So we have 2 very important milestones to share about Caden in the last few days.  First off, his first haircut!  We buzzed his little head, because his hair is so fine and all-over-the-place he looked like a wild child.  Now he looks very handsome.  You can see the undertaking below:

He was such a good little boy and sat there the whole time patiently.

Here’s a close-up, you can see how his hair stuck out all over.

Next is the most exciting news, CADEN TOOK HIS FIRST STEPS!  He’s been practicing all this week standing up and moving his little leg forward.  Well today he did it, he took those few steps.  We caught it on video below while we were watching a movie and cleaning, and I apologize for my baby in a diaper, he likes to take his pants off any chance he gets! It’s a new skill.

First off, cute random pic of my kids to the left!

We had Caden’s Occupational Therapist and Speech Pathologist here today and we talked with them some about Caden’s left-sided weakness. When trying to walk with him he’s dragging his left leg, and since his thumb x-rays came back structurally okay we think his left hand and not doing a pincer grasp correctly either is all connected. If you recall, when Caden came home from the hospital he couldn’t turn his head to one side because of some tightness and weakness at the same time. This could be because of some mild cerebral palsy, and just to clarify since there is a lot of misconception about cerebral palsy I’ll give a definition: a broad term that describes a group of neurological (brain) disorders. It is a life-long condition that affects the communication between the brain and the muscles, causing a permanent state of uncoordinated movement and posturing. So it’s a catch all diagnosis that doesn’t necessarily mean any type of mental handicap (it can though) but is rather more typically related to the muscles. If this is the case we wouldn’t get a diagnosis for a few years because it would appear to be mild and we’ll just have to wait and see what he’s able to do in the future. We never really held any hope for our son to become coordinated enough for sports anyway, since his eyes and risk for retinal detachment would actually be more concerning.

We’ve got Caden’s swallow study scheduled for April 9th. His Speech Therapist is going to try and make it up there with me as well to observe it. It should be amusing, trying to force feed a child who hates drinking to swallow some chalky not-so-cleverly-disguised-liquid that is suppose to taste like a variation of cherries or bubblegum. I mean, for a regular child who could drink, it would be difficult. Add in a child who refuses for liquid to touch their lips most days… and I guess I won’t be dressing Caden in any cute/good clothes that day! If you are curious as to what a swallow study is here’s a great explanation below:

What is a swallow study?

A swallow study (also known as a videofluoroscopic swallow study) is a procedure used to test children experiencing difficulties with feeding and/or swallowing.

* The swallow study is performed in the medical imaging department with a speech-language pathologist and a radiologist. Special equipment is used to provide a “moving x-ray” of the child’s swallow.
* During the test, the child is placed in a chair next to the x-ray equipment. The speech-language pathologist feeds the child a variety of foods mixed with barium. The barium makes the food visible during the x-ray.
* The speech pathologist closely watches the x-ray to see how the food and drink move through the mouth and into the esophagus during chewing and swallowing. She also watches for any signs of aspiration (when the food or liquid goes “down the wrong way” into the airway).

With Caden we are also going to be watching his nasal area as he is still getting food coming out of his nose every time he eats.  He may have a fistula or other hole up there so that will be informative.

Not much to report.

Job search continues, it’s been 5 months! Hard to believe. For updates on the states, since my mind has melted with the sheer number of companies and people: North Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Utah, Washington and Texas are the contenders right now.

Caden continues to learn more signs. No new sounds yet, still just Ha, Ga, Ge and… that’s about it.

Parent/Teacher conference for Gena went well. Her only struggle is handwriting, but she is a full year younger then the other kids.

Adessa loves preschool, loves her teacher, loves her friends. Though she is mad at her preschool best friend Peyton for telling on her because she wasn’t sharing. Preschool drama, I love it.

All right, just to show all of you how close Caden is to walking all by himself, I uploaded a video of him pushing a chair around in the kitchen.  He’s not walking independently yet and he’s still a little shaky but he was having such a grand time I had to show it. He’s 19 months old and I think… I think in a few weeks we may get those first steps all by himself!!

We’ll start with Gena.  Daniel had a phone conversation with Gena’s principal today at the school and they brought in a bunch of kids to find out what happened and who exactly it was. They were able to identify the boy and they talked to him.  The custodian also went out to the playground and filled in the hole in the woodchips that they had been playing in. Hopefully that’s the last of the incident.

On Friday I went up to the hospital with Caden and got his thumb x-rays done. The bones look fine and Caden’s odd lil’ thumb is actually “soft tissue swelling”. Make of that what you will.  Since he’s had it since birth it’s not really any swelling that will go down but just the way his thumb is and will always be. A little odd and off-kilter. This doesn’t help us figure out why he’s not using the thumb correctly unfortunately.  So we’ll wait and see.

I had promised the girls that on Friday night they could have a Pajama Party.  Which they were so excited about, so as we drove to Wal-Mart to pick up snacks and a cheap movie I asked Gena how her day at school was.  She responds with “Mom, it was terrible.” Gena is so hard to get information from usually.  She’s the type of kid that you ask her how her day was and it’s always, “fine”. Ask her what she did at school, “stuff”. If you push her she gets upset and feels like she’s being interrogated,  but when I asked her what happened she just started spilling the details.

At recess, she was playing a monster game with some of the kids.  They had dug out a hole in the woodchips and they were trying to get the eggs from the monster who was a boy in Gena’s grade. This boy apparently turned on Gena without any provocation and began to repeatedly punch her in the stomach. I asked her why she didn’t run away and she told me that he kept pushing her to the ground and then started punching her again over and over. I asked her if she told him to stop and she said she did and told him that he was hurting her.  She doesn’t know the boy’s name. She knows her classmates who saw the whole thing though. I asked her if she went and told a teacher on the playground but she told me that the bell rang to line up so she did to. When she went inside she told her teacher who dismissed her and told her not to play the game or with that boy again. She went to the bathroom after that with a friend because she didn’t want to cry in front of her classmates and her tummy hurt.

Needless to say, we left a message with the school and I will be going in on Monday to talk to them about this.  For 5 hours aftwards she was complaining about how her stomach still hurt and she couldn’t bend over. I am, of course, livid. Even more so when one of Gena’s friends tells her that this same boy has pushed her down before and started laughing at her. Obviously, this kid is a problem. Gena does not want to go to school on Monday, she’s afraid to see this boy. I am just hoping that I don’t go mother bear on whatever poor soul at the school listens to this story on Monday as I think of my little 7 year old girl getting punched repeatedly in the stomach and pushed to the ground. She did the right thing, the thing we TELL our kids to do when something like this happens: don’t fight back, go tell an adult. Then she was ignored by her Teacher. I’ll let you all know on Monday how this turns out.

That night though, in conjunction with the PJ party we also let the girls do a “camp out” in there room in their little tents.  They love that. It was pitch black in their room but I got the picture below:

The past 2 weeks the girls and I have been doing a lot of arts & crafts that I had to share. First up are Daniel’s birthday presents that the girls were so excited to paint and do. Daniel was so excited to get them and see the effort the girls put into them:

Adessa assembled and painted the birdhouse and Gena helped mix and mold and painted the stepping stone

Next up are the school projects Gena needed to do so I got Adessa in on it as well:

We dyed the soap and then poured it into the molds. Gena mixed together Orange and Adessa did the purple.

We did these T-shirts with fabric paint. Gena did the left one tracing the dog and bone with a template. And I did the outline of the flowers while Adessa colored them in.

These are the suckers we did.  I wasn’t able to grab a picture of the red vanilla ones Adessa did, but Gena choose to do Peanut Butter.

More on the egg allergy front, it seems that Caden is really truly highly allergic to eggs.  I just spoke with his doctor because last night, when my parents were watching the kids while I took Daniel out for a birthday celebration, they gave him his dinner (egg free) and some fruit.  The rest of the family had some hot dog buns (contains egg) and a fruit salad with mayonaisse (contains egg) and my mom mentioned that Caden’s face looked more red and he had the watery eyes again.  This morning even his face was still red, he had watery eyes, runny nose and more.  So I called up his pediatrician and her first words were “doesn’t surprise me, he tested really high for it.”  We have to keep even anyone that’s cooked or touched eggs away from Caden and they have to wash their hands and face before they can kiss him, touch him, etc.  She even recommended that Caden not be in the same room if I prepare something with eggs.  Wowww. Food allergies are serious business.  It would be rare for eggs to cause an anaphylaxis reaction, but the more exposure he gets to eggs the worse his allergic reaction will get.

Found interesting information that kids with egg allergy can become egg tolerant, but the rate that children are developing tolerance to eggs is slower than in the past when it was thought that most children outgrew egg allergy by age 5 or 6. An egg allergy study published in December 2007 stated:

• 4% of children outgrew egg allergy by age 4
• 12% of children outgrew egg allergy by age 6
• 37% of children outgrew egg allergy by age 10
• 68% of children outgrew egg allergy by age 16

They found that a kid was less likely to outgrow the allergy if they had high IgE antibodies when blood tested for egg allergy (strike 1 for Caden), if they had other atopic disease like eczema or asthma (strike 2), or if they had other food allergies (we’re good here). So we might be in this for the long haul or be lucky!