Chloe Update - Upcoming Surgery

EYES
Chloe will have another eye surgery on April 19th. This one is called strabismus surgery - a muscle surgery that will hopefully straighten out her left eye. Although she is using the left eye it's still significantly weaker than her right eye and crosses in pretty dramatically. She sees two pictures and probably has trouble putting them together. (She looks at everything with her head turned to the side - a sign that she's trying to align the two pictures.) We hope that her eyes will work together after the surgery. There are two muscles that the doctor can work on and he said he wants to be conservative; working on only one muscle. It's common to need follow-up surgeries.
Chloe's Vision Therapist is certain that Chloe's vision impairment has had a significant impact on her development delays. In addition, her world will be completely different after the surgery so it may take several weeks for her to re-learn balance and distance. But, if the surgery works, her overall vision could improve dramatically.


COMMUNICATION
Chloe babbles a lot. She talks to everything! Her spoon, her teethers, her blocks, her books, her toys...you name it and she's had an in depth conversation with it. She's FINALLY saying "ma." It's strange to me because her vocabulary of sounds is extensive and I thought "ma" was one of the easier sounds for babies to make. She has to work on it, though. "mmmmmmmAH"
She's trying to imitate words when we ask her to. Some words she's imitated are: Sissy (didee), Puppy (geegee), Kitty (geegee), Dada (Dada), Mama (mmmmmmA), Bear (beah). Something new that Chloe's been doing is performing a few actions when asked. She'll "Put the ball IN," "Gimme 5," "Touch (usually an animal or our touch 'n feel books)," "Will you give me a HUG?" "Will you give me a KISS?" She'll also clap at the end of every song and after everything she does. And she'll make the 'milk' sign (open and close her fist) when I say, "bottle" or "Chloe eat?"

EATING
We're still on purees and I think we'll be there for a while. Chloe still won't self feed anything mushy or soft in texture. The only change I've recently made is going from 5bottles/2puree meals a day to 4bottles/3puree meals a day. This is also forcing me to try a little harder on the sippy cup. Chloe will not hold the sippy cup to drink (only to shake and fling water around). And she'll barely drink from it. She usually just pushes it away from her mouth and tries to grab it (so that she can shake it and fling water around). I did hear a sucking sound last night, though. That was encouraging.

WEIGHT
Chloe didn't gain a lot of weight this past month - only 3ounces. But she's at a respectable 20lb 7oz. We were having some difficulties with the bottle for a while and it could have been a number of things: -she's been teething and spitting up more, - she got a skin infection and went on antibiotics for a while, or - she's just trying to transition herself off the bottle and refusing formula. I'm hoping the new 4/3 diet will help to get her weight gain on track. I don't want any raised eyebrows the next time we visit Dr. Sobande, the pulmonologist.

GROSS MOTOR
Chloe is a crawling fiend. She loves her new independence and crawls all over the house. And boy can she boogie. She gave up any and all attempts at standing for a couple of weeks but I think that was because she was too excited about exploring the whole house using her amazing new skill of fast crawling. She's recently starting pulling herself up again. She'll crawl to and pull herself up on anything now. It's fun to see. We may not see the quick transition to walking that I had predicted, though, because of her surgery. The vision therapist warned us about that. For now we're just letting her enjoy crawling and not pushing the issue on walking.

MISCELLANEOUS HEALTH
Chloe got a little infection under her skin that won't seem to go away. Apparently, her skin dried out (probably because of her teething drool/snot) and some bacteria got into a little dry skin crack. It became infected. It looked like no more than dry skin, a minor rash, and/or pimples. For a month I thought it was dry skin, pimples, or food allergies and treated it with lotion, bag balm, neosporin, changed her diet to bland foods. It came and went, staying between her nose and chin. When it spread up her face so I took her to the doctor. She's finished a round of oral antibiotics, a round of topical antibiotics, and we're about to start a second round of antibiotics because it keeps coming back. I'm trying to not worry but I really hope it goes away for good this time!
She had her final Synagis. Whew! Two shots a month for 5 months. Not fun. Chloe officially hates her nurses. And even though we only have to pay 10% of the cost it adds up when the shots are $3200 a month! And this final month was a doozie. She got two shots and then I had to take her in the next day for a third because they under-dosed her! I asked the doctor to smack the nurse who did that. Not cool lady! At least they caught it, though. We're almost through Chloe's second flu/RSV season without any more than a few cases of the sniffles. Very thankful!