Kathleen

Who? That would be Miss Katie. Talk, talk, talk. My girls love to talk!
Katie's language has really taken another leap forward this last month.
She talks in sentences now most of the time. I hear "Momma, I see a
train/car/truck/etc" all the time. I hear "LEAF me LOOOONE!" (Leave me
alone) and "MOMMA!! Evan hit me 'GAIN (again)" way too often. I also
hear "Jesus love you", "A-A-Apple, B-B-Butterfly", and "one, two,
three, nine, twelve" (her counting is coming right along! LOL). I also
hear her standard greeting of "Hi ya, Momma!" on a regular basis. But
the sentence of the week is "Who dat?" by which she means "what is
that?" She does this about EVERYTHING in sight over the last few days.
The sentence of the week last week as "NEEEED potty!!" followed by
clothing flying off, but that's another post. :)

And just for fun a picture of Miss K-K after her new haircut.

(Yes, I know this post is a month late. No, I don't have a real excuse. Bad blogger!)

Our little Katie bug is two!! Wooohoo! :)  She weights in at 28.5
pounds and stands 35.5 inches tall (90th percentile; yeah, another TALL
child!)
Miss Katie is talking up a storm (50-100 words) and continues to be our
most active toddler yet. I call her my octopus because she has a way of
getting into everything like she has eight arms not two!
So in honor of Katie's 2nd birthday, two things I love about her!
1.) She has the best sense of humor for a 2 year old! Seriously, she
can make me laugh way too easy! She knows how to use it too. :)
2.) She is so sweet. If she accidentally bumps me, she will say "sor-wee" and kiss the injury! Too cute.

Love you, baby girl!

A few pictures from her party including her Elmo cake. :)

One of those things that we have struggled with as Christian parents is that pesky little holiday at the end of the month of October. I was raised without any acknowledgment of Halloween and never dressed up or when trick-or-treating. Brian was allowed to dressed and t-n-t, but still it was not a good holiday. Interestingly enough, I am actually the one with the least hang ups over the kids dressing up. At this point, we do not want to celebrate Halloween and all it's dark meanings, but this year we did dress the kids up for a few party type things in the week prior. I'm not sure exactly what we'll do in the years to come, but I would love to see some type of celebration of All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day. But who knows.

Anyway a few picture of our Princess, Cowboy, and the Ladybug!

So when we first came home from China, we took Katie to see our wonderful pediatrician right away.  She got us in to see the closest cleft team in May.  This team is over three hours drive away from us, but please understand we were happy to do this for Katie. However, to say that I was unimpressed by this visit would be an understatement. Usually these visits are scheduled with a TEAM- a plastic surgeon, ENT, audiologist, speech therapist, pediatric dentist, and social worker, etc. Well, that day we saw only the surgeon. He spent all of 5 minutes in the room. He asked a few questions. He looked in Katie's mouth for a hot second and said she didn't have a cleft palate (we know that!) He says come back in six months and we'll talk about lip revision.

Say WHAT??? Have you seen her lip repair??? Seriously??? It's not perfect, but it's close. Certainly close enough for an 18 month old! It is functional and looks nice. Why in THE world would I risk ruining that at the age of 2?? The norm is to do a touch up around 5 when the facial growth has often out grown the scar and right before the child goes to school!

I have to ask this man what the projected plan of care would be for Katie since her palate is intact before he thinks to talk about surgery beyond lip revision. He says she will have no speech issues or ear issues since she has an intact palate. Oh REALLY?? He can tell all that from a handful of questions, and a one minute exam that did not include looking in her ears? So now he's a surgeon, an ENT, audiologist, AND a speech therapist!! Yeah, RIGHT!

When we left his office, 5 minutes later, I was hopping mad! Seven hour round trip to see one doctor for 5 minute to tell me a lot of crap!

We came home and I went back to my ped and told her how unhappy I was. I got a referral to a local ENT and audiologist with in the week. Katie failed the hearing test which might happen due to her age. But the ENT agree with me that the only way to know was to do an ABR test under general anesthesia.  So in June we did exactly that. The ABR came back normal (yeah!!), however, she failed the test to check for fluid/pressure in her middle ear.  So while she was under anyway, they placed tubes in both ears. Thanks Mister Big-Shot-Plastic-Surgeon. You were so right that she wouldn't have ear issues. NOT!!

With that taken care of, I went on a search to find another cleft team so I could fire the crazy guy. At this time, my ped mentioned that she had heard of a new doctor in a nearby city (under a 2 hour drive) who did cleft repairs. I did some research, and it turns out that he was once the co-director of a cranio-facial team at a LARGE children's hospital. He had come to this regional hospital to start a cleft team there. We were able to get in to see him in late Sept, and I am sooo happy! He took time to talk with us and answer questions. Turns out he has a son born with cleft lip/palate adopted from Henan, China!! He agreed with me that there was no reason to touch Katie's lip for sometime, perhaps not until her bone graft around the age of 9. I'm SOOO much more comfortable with this doctor. We will go back around the first of the year for a full cleft team meeting and they will evaluate Katie's speech at that time. I'm not worried since she has over 50 words and people outside of family can understand a lot of them. Also early intervention found her to be on track in speech. But I now feel certain we are in good hands.

Then.

Now.

We were very blessed to be able to make an all expense paid trip to Dollywood this month. Brian's employer has a Family Day there as part of their yearly employee appreciation week. We got free admission for the whole family and a free meal. Since all our kids are young, we took our time getting there and didn't actually get into the park until about 11:30. Still we had a wonderful day.

There were a lot of rides even for our little kids. Besides the kiddie rides, Miriam was actually tall enough to ride all but 8 rides in the whole park (not that we even came close to riding all she could ride!) We did some for the whole family like the carousel. Miriam was standing in line for it when she spotted THE carousel animal she HAD to have. Yeah, a chicken!! LOL

Even doing kiddie rides, we soon learned that Katie liked the rides ONLY if she was with Momma or Daddy. If she wasn't the tears flowed.

We also learned that Evan is much like his father. He doesn't much care for fast, high rides. In fact Evan hates heights. So I think he only rode about 5 rides all day. We tried, he preferred to sit it out.

Miriam on the other hand... well, we couldn't get a ride high enough or fast enough for the little adrenaline junkie!! She wasn't tall enough for a real roller coaster which I think she would have loved. But she was just tall enough for their indoor roller coaster. If you ask her what her least favorite thing about Dollywood was she would say the fire in the roller coaster. The theme of this ride is that you are a firefighter rolling through the back hills of Tennessee putting out fires. It scared Miriam. However, if you ask Miriam what her favorite ride was it was also the roller coaster. Cause little Miss Fearless might not have like the "fire", but she DID like dropping 50 feet into pitch blackness at 45 miles an hour. Yup, that's my girl!! :o)

All in all, it was a really fun day! Hope we can go again next year. And maybe Miriam will have grown 6 inches. :oD

Katie told me, "I love you" this morning for the first time. I know she knows what it means because she followed it by running over and giving me an unsolicited kiss.

Evan also have a cute way of saying I love you. I often say, "I love you little dude" to him. Now he responds with, "I love you Momma dude"!

Well, we originally though that Katie was going to be missing 2 teeth in the front where her cleft is (the second incisor and the canine). A few weeks back I noticed that the canine was squeezzzzzing it's self in at a slight angle. Then tonight I thought I saw something else while brushing Katie's teeth. I stuck a finger in and yup, there was the bud of the incisor waaaay up in the cleft. What do you know? She got 16 teeth now!

We've had a lot of rain the last month. I finally got tired of being stuck in the house so out we went. I think they had fun. :)