Another busy week

Tomorrow Luke will have his 2nd rectal biopsy to determine why he is still having issues related to the Hirschsprung's disease (not stooling on his own, extremely distended belly, vomiting). He will undergo general anesthesia but should be able to come home tomorrow afternoon, assuming he does have any of the same issues he had before after his other two surgeries. Thursday we will meet with Dr. Hotaling, our ENT doctor, to have his hearing retested in hopes of seeing some improvement since the ear tube surgery. Friday Luke will begin his weekly physical therapy. I'm very excited that I was aggressive enough to get the therapist I really wanted who came highly recommended from several other moms. His passion is Down syndrome, so he has extensive experience working with children with Down syndrome. We are still waiting to find out who Luke's speech and developmental therapists will be. It takes a little longer for the Early Intervention Coordinator to find therapists in our case because it has to be someone who has the specific experience needed. For example, we need a speech therapist who has specific feeding background since that is what they will primarily be working on for now. His feeding has been very inconsistent, so he will also have an evaluation done by a nutritional therapist who might need to see him 1-2 times per month. Luke has to get fortified breastmilk (yes, I'm still pumping!!), so she would help us to make sure he is getting the right amount of fortifier and calories. Believe it or not, he could go from 8pm to 8am without feeding if we let him! While that sounds nice, he can't afford to go that long without eating. The problem is that when we try to wake him to feed, he just can't get the coordination he needs to take the bottle. There's nothing worse than wasting a valuable bottle of breastmilk when trying to pump enough for 2 babies!

On another note, Jackson made it through his second afternoon in regular underwear (Handy Manny, of course) without any accidents. Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, we started the bad habit of giving him 2 M&Ms as a reward each time, so he will say he has to go potty over and over again and literally just try to push out a couple of drops so that he can get his M&Ms. Yes, he actually pushes out the pee, grunting and all! When we started this it was with the bags of Christmas ones, so he's stuck on always having to have 2 green only...no red. Not sure what we'll do when the Christmas M&Ms are gone. Something tells me that he will no longer care about the color, so long as he gets his treat. Thank goodness I only started with just giving him 2 versus a little handful, which Pete likely would have done. Several people have reassured me that bribery is completely justified when it comes to potty training and that eventually he'll understand that he doesn't get rewards each time. I sure hope he's not 18 and still expecting M&Ms each time he uses the potty! ( :