5 Months and Great News For Emma Kate

Thomas is five months old today! I can hardly believe how fast the time is flying. As usual, today I got him all set up for his monthly chalkboard picture. I was thinking that I would be lucky if I got one good picture, but I must have been really lucky, because I got so many cute ones that I couldn’t choose just one. His little personality is really starting to show and I thought these pictures captured it perfectly.



He is sweet and silly and gives me the biggest grins when I smile at him. I can deal with waking up at 5am if it means looking at his cute face. Speaking of 5am, this little stinker is still not sleeping through the night. He just loves that 2/3am feed. We’re working on it and hopefully he’ll be sleeping through the night soon. He is a great daytime baby, taking 3 or 4 good naps throughout the day.



Thomas is holding his head up really good. He’s rolling stomach to back often (he started that at 6 weeks), but hasn’t rolled from his back to his stomach yet. He is working on sitting up, but isn’t there quite yet.




Thomas is a great eater! He is great at nursing, taking a bottle, and he loves his rice cereal. We just introduced cereal in the past month, and he laps it up!



Thomas is at such a fun age. He gets so cracked up when he looks at himself in the mirror. He’s also really found his voice in the last few weeks. He talks up a storm in the mornings, making happy little sounds from the second he wakes up. I think it’s really cute, even if it is really early. He’s also learned how to blow raspberries.



Thomas is really starting to have fun playing with toys. He got so many great toys for Christmas and he loves to look at them and move them around so they will light up or sing. He also loves his little play mat. He likes to bat at the little bugs that dangle from it, and he occasionally gets some help from his sister. She gets a little crazy sometimes, so we have to watch them close to make sure that she doesn’t step right on his face. Silly girl!

Speaking of big sister, she has had some great checkups lately. We saw cardiology last week and got a great report. Her heart looks great. Her repair looks great, and there’s no leakage whatsoever. Hooray!

That same day we did a swallow study, which was SO not fun. I have always hated swallow studies and this one was just as bad as the last three. Forcing a child with oral aversions to swallow is pure torture. Cover the only food that they will tolerate in barium and it’s double the fun. Even though she swallowed VERY little, it still went down the right way. Hopefully this will be good enough for the doctor to let us lay off of the swallow studies for a while. Fingers crossed!

Today we went for a lung scan. This is a test that was ordered by her cardiologist. You might remember when we were in Boston that we discovered that she had stenosis of the left pulmonary artery. You can read more about that here and here. Well, we fixed that with a heart cath and a balloon, but we need to make sure that as she grows, the artery doesn’t narrow again. Because it is really hard to see the left pulmonary artery on an echo, a lung scan tells us what we need to know. If the scan shows that there is even blood flow to the lungs, we can conclude that the left pulmonary artery is in good shape. The test today did show even blood flow (48% to one lung; 51% to the other), so we are very happy about that! Emma Kate was such a big girl throughout the whole procedure and didn’t even cry when they stuck her to inject the radioactive dye. I have to give a little shout out to my friend Mickey for this one. Not sure how we ever survived without that Ipad!!

We are so thankful for all good reports from her doctors and praise God for his watchful eye over her and our family.

Today it was especially nice to get good news after that, um, horrible game last night. Oh well. FOREVER LSU!