Spring Break

Nathan had a math conference he wanted to go to the weekend starting spring break and Hannah had doctor appointments that Monday so we made a little family trip to Utah together.

While Nathan was at conference on Saturday, Gramma Cherie, Papa Stan, the kids and I visited Aunt Eva's family.  Robert and Hailey had a wonderful time but Hannah went hysterical for 30-45 minutes (it could have even been close to an hour). The only thing I can think that set it off is that I needed to feed baby Rachel when she wanted me to hold her. However, after I was done with baby I could not get her to settle down. Leaving her alone didn't work, holding her didn't work, shutting her in a portacrib didn't help either. Eventually she calmed down to Baby Einstein's water DVD that Morgan and Eva had.  It's times like these that I strongly feel that either her medicine or her seizures are greatly affecting her behavior because a normal two year old shouldn't be that out of control for that long. After a good morning visit, we left their house and had lunch at McDonald's. Then went to the local Aquarium.  I'm so glad I had Papa Stan and Gramma Cherie because I couldn't keep track of the kids and the many directions they wanted to go.  The place was very busy that day.

 Here they are looking at the crocodiles. Robert liked them a lot.

 Hailey's always up for a photo-op.

 I love how fascinated Hannah loves in this picture.

In the gift shop, Hannah took all the otter backpacks she could reach. It was a funny sight.

Nathan and I got to go out to eat at the Gateway and after putting the kids to bed saw The Vow together. We haven't been able to have a nice LONG date like that for a while (even though Rachel was there with us).

Gramma Cherie and Papa Stan took Hailey and Robert to Temple Square early Sunday morning. Then we had a nice time at church with them with a pretty walk in the neighborhood. They had a lot of "popcorn" trees blossoming. It's nice to finally see the signs of Spring.

After church, we had dinner with Aunt Kerstin's family. The kids enjoyed playing with play foam with Connor.  They really like having cousin's close by.

On Monday, Hailey and Robert spent all day playing with my cousin Mikael's kids while we took Hannah to her doctor' appointments.

Our first appointment was with Paula Peterson about the Ketogentic Diet.  It is a very restrictive diet that is all fat and no carbs.  However, it has great success in at least reducing the seizures by half and in a lot of cases eliminating seizures entirely. She gave us an assignment to see if this is the right course for us. The assignment included reading a book about it, keeping a 3 day food journal and trying out the sample meals.

Then we went from the SLC office to the Riverton office to see another neurologist to get a second opinion on Hannah.  I really liked this doctor and we clicked better with him then the first one we were seeing. He was checking her reflexes and noticed that her left leg didn't respond like her right leg did. He didn't make it seem like a big deal and did not talk about it but it will be interesting to see if she continues to be less responsive in that leg.  He also was interesting in all the papers we have acquired from visits done in Pocatello. I feel like he has a better base to really examine Hannah on.

He also finds it particular that Hannah doesn't have expressive language yet and that may be a sign that this is more then childhood seizures but nothing can gives us answers but time and maybe a few more tests.

To get things really to start the diet we needed some blood work done so we did that after the appointment.  At this point things started going down hill. First of all it's about 5:00pm now and the Doctor ran over Hannah's toe on accident with his rolling chair.  It was hard to calm he down after that and she hated the band aid even more.  The office's waiting room had these cool bubble tubes that change colors and has balls floating in them.  Even Nate and I were fascinated with them.  Then the nurse can out and blew bubbles to Hannah and finally got her calm. 

They needed a urine sample and had to tape a bag onto her which Hannah did not appreciate and later on we had technical difficulties with since the bag was a little small and the diaper they had was a size too small (and difficult to put on a wiggling, exhausted 2 year-old). She leaked out a little bit in the waiting room to get the labs done.  When it was time to get blood drawn, she went hysterical and made it impossible to get blood drawn. (The tech poked her twice then suggested we go back to the main campus since they'll have more help available.)

So before we even got dinner, Hannah fell asleep in the car. This made he a little calmer for the blood test. They tried poking the veins in her hands but that didn't work. She she tried the elbow again. That time it was successful expect it clotted for one test. So they did a finger point. Five pokes in total that night.

We were finally done and picked up Hailey and Robert around 9:00pm.  Rachel who had a diaper rash from her antibiotics screamed most of the way home which is very difficult to handle since we were all exhausted and very strange for her since she is usually very content and happy.  We finally made it home a midnight.

And by the way, all the blood work can back normal.