Hannah & Zoe

Friday, March 16, 2012

Sisterly love

These pictures says it all.....best friends forever.

XOXOXOXOXO

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Despite a continuous string of ear infections, Zoe doesn't let anything interfere with trying to catch up with her big sister. Here she spends probably 15-20 minutes continuously somersaulting, obviously inspired by her sister's mad gymnastics skills. She had such a blast, as did we watching her tumble again and again.

When I take her to Hannah's class at MegaGym up in San Rafael, I spend the 45 minutes trying to distract her and keep her from storming the gymnastics floor. She really cannot wait to get up there! Here she is, surrounded by all the big girls getting their stamps after class, on April 3rd.

Thanks Coach Trevor!

Friday, March 2, 2012

Hannah's Increasingly Prolific

Since the beginning of the year, Hannah has become more and more focused on her artwork. Nearly every day, she spends a significant chunk of time focused on perfecting her drawing and writing skills, creating people, flowers, big smiley faces with braces, and words. The collage below is a small selection of the kinds of drawings she was most heavily focused on creating in January and February (and many more are stashed in rolls around our very disorganized house). She has since moved onto to doing her "work" in a big spiral bound notebook that I finally relinquished to her (she definitely needed it more than I did!). It was probably one of those 350 page notebooks that I'd used for a couple dozen To Do lists. Over March, she filled every single remaining page with more drawings, and even some notes regarding playdates and such to friends at school. I think it makes a strong case against the "death of paper" due to technology advances. And I'm excited about a return to real letter writing! That said, she does also love making rainbow boxes and faces on daddy's iPad with Little Fingers...

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Zoe's 15-Month (& 100th!) Dr. appt

At her 15-month check-up last week, Zoe weighed in at 21 lbs 6 oz, which according to Dr. Piel, looked like an uptick in her weight, although she's still hovering around the 28th percentile. One would think the increase in her whole milk consumption (thanks to eliminating nursing), plus the whole milk+formula+oatmeal concoction 2x/day, would be helping to boost her caloric intake. But she is a very active girl, who spends lots of time running around and roughhousing with Hannah. So perhaps she is just burning those calories as they come? As the charts below indicate, my BabyConnect app (which literally has every data point of her entire life chronicled) indicates she's pretty much remained flat around that 25-30th percentile for weight since 9 months.

Her height at 31 inches puts her in the

67th percentile, which has also been fairly consistent despite her modest girth. This also made Dr. Piel confident that she is indeed getting the proper nutrition. That said, we had learned at her one year appointment in November that her hemoglobin levels were low, indicating inadequate iron (her test read 10.7, with anything north of 11.0 considered OK). Since we couldn't convince her to eat liver, clams, oysters, spinach, legumes, kidneys, or brussel sprouts, we've been giving her a daily multivitamin (Polyvisol with Iron) and it seems to have helped. The dark circles under her eyes have lessened, and her hemoglobin test came back at 11.3!

Despite all that pretty decent news, she did have another cold at the time of her appointment, and as expected, we discovered she also now had her third ear infection. So a course of Amoxicillin was prescribed -- 10 mg per day for ten days. However, a return visit to the doctor today (day eight), showed that her right ear, while improving, was still not better... AND now her left ear was infected too. This is a first as her previous two infections have always been limited to her right ear. So now we must start a more potent course of antibiotics (Augmentin, which tends to cause diarrhea and nausea....greaaaat). This explained why she was up screaming for over and hour in the middle of the night last night! She is rarely up in the night anymore, unless something is really off.

I must say Zoe has had a pretty rough time of it -- she seems to get sick at the slightest provocation. Since her first cold at only 15 days old, and many more colds since, then pneumonia at 10 months, her first ear infection on her first birthday (Nov. 6th), another ear infection over Christmas, and now her third times two (her left ear had been fine last week, but this cold will not relent)... I feel terrible for her! The doctor says the second kid is always more sickly than the first since #1 brings home all those germs from preschool. On the bright side, I will give Zoe credit for being a very good-natured patient. For all her issues -- the runny noses and clogged up ears, not to mention freakin' pneumonia! -- I'd almost never suspect she was ever suffering since she never really indicates her pain. No ear tugging, no obvious complaining. Sure, when she's overtired or hungry she can certainly get fussy. But compared to her sister, who makes a pretty dramatic stink about the tiniest ow-ie, Zoe is a pretty tough cookie.

I'm so sorry, Zoe, that I've not been able to keep you healthy..! Hopefully, in the near term, no major damage will come of it -- judging from her constant babbling, and the new words she's starting to pick up every day, her hearing seems to be OK for now at least. And in the long term, you'll be that much more resistant to all the other illnesses the world will undoubtedly hurl your way! Not that I want to talk about hurling right now seeing as all this post-nasal drip has led to a very trigger-happy gag-reflex, which Zoe has never been prone to doing (also unlike her sister, the Princess of Puke!).

Please, get well soon, Zoe! xoxoxox

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Daredevil Zoe

Zoe has made it abundantly clear that she is just as fearless and thrill-seeking as Hannah has always been. Here she is at Blackie's Pasture conquering the slide solo as daddy looks on, obviously confident she's got it mastered.