SharonAndAdam.com

Happy Birthday Little Buddy!

Happy birthday Fulton!  We love you so much bright eyes.  

I hope you always blow me kisses at bed time and across the car

….and put away your things in the right place when I ask

…and share with your sister at difficult moments

…and kiss your little sister to make sweet moments

…and say “daddy” when he comes home and drop everything to give him a hug

…and learn to say “Alleluia” so that when you sing the song it’s not just “ahhhhhh….”

And even if you don’t always do some of these things, I hope you know how much we love you and how much joy you bring to our little family.

Servant of God, Fulton Sheen. Pray for us!

“I would NEVER”

Before being blessed by parenthood, I had a mental list of things I would NEVER do as a parent. 

I would NEVER put my kids in the basket part of the shopping cart. The label on the seats CLEARLY say not to do such things.  But with three kids under the age of 4, one of which is faster than the speed of light, and shopping carts that usually only hold one child (expect at SAMS and some supermarkets), I have relaxed my stance on this one.

I would NEVER send my kids to the nursery during Mass.  We’re the parents. They’re the kids. Shouldn’t we be able to control our children for 2 hours for Mass?  Any good Catholic parent should be able to get their children to sit during Mass–or at least be quiet, right?  Well, after recently being outnumbered, and realizing that someone’s screaming can be heard by the people in the front of the church when we’re in the cry room some 40 pews back, AND being blessed with a husband that was serving as an acolyte this morning, we tried out the nursery.  And you know what?  It wasn’t so bad.  I only had to “shh” one child and I actually heard the readings AND the homily! 

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Adam!  Thanks for bringing such joy and fun to our family. Pookie bear, I love you so…

We had a great Mad Hatter’s Tea Party this year to celebrate.  You can see some the hats people were sporting in our photo gallery.

And a very merry un-birthday to the rest of you today!

Fulton’s Speech

For the last few months we’ve been working on getting Fulton to start talking.  The concern for his lack of speech came up by his pediatrican when we took him for a wellcheck back in August.  We decided to work harder with  him and if he didn’t show marked progress by the end of October I’d start looking into the next steps.

 We have an appointment this Friday with the Early Childhood Intervention program to have him evaluated and assessed for a speech delay.   At their recommendation and because there is a history of hearing loss on my side of the family, we had his hearing checked last Friday.

They performed a couple of tests on him.  The first was a hearing test to make sure he is hearing the pitches a person of normal hearing should hear.  The high pitch was the only one that was below normal.  However, the physician assistant said since it’s a subjective test, it could be that it was Fulton’s first time having such a test or he was bored or distracted when they were doing that pitch.  So we’ll know better when he has the test done again. 

The second test was a typanometry.  This objective test measures how energy is transmitted in the middle ear.  In a healthy individual, the maximum sound transmitted  happens when the pressure inside the middle ear equals the pressure outside.  Fulton results were below normal on his typanogram.  This means that the pressure inside his middle ear is different than what’s outside his ear. The audiologist said you can liken this to when you’re in an airplane and your ears need to pop.  This is how Fulton is hearing right now.

When the physician assistant (PA) examined his eyes, she said he has allergies and it could be causing the pressure difference.  So he is temporarily on a nasal spray to relieve his allergies.  We’re due back in 6 weeks to retest him.  If there is no difference, the PA will talk to us about putting tubes in his ears.

In the meantime, we’ll have the evaluations done on Friday and try to find out what the big picture is and how best to proceed to get Fulton’s speech in gear.