Randi and the boys on the Emerald Coast.
Amongst the sea oats.
Note: We put Wyatt in the foreground to make him look bigger than Parks.
Parks and I getting our toes wet.
It's an amazing thing to be living in a miracle and to recognize it. We feel that way everyday about our boys, especially Wyatt. I wanted to update everyone on some unresolved issues and bring a few things to light that may not have been addressed in this forum previously.
In addition to Wyatt not having hypoglycemia and requiring no medications, we recently found out that he no longer has an inguinal hernia, where a small portion of the bowels bulges into the groin, an umbilical hernia in his belly button, nor a hydrocele, which is a fluid-filled sac surrounding a testicle that results in swelling of the scrotum. We thought that we were going to have to have surgery to correct this, but praise God it has resolved on its own. We also corrected his torticollis through physical therapy. It's a condition in which the head is tilted toward one side. Once this was resolved, it has helped improve his plagiocephaly, a malformation of the head marked by an oblique slant to the main axis of the skull. He also underwent a CT scan to find out that he also did not have Craniosynostosis, or the premature fusion of the sutures of the bones of the skull, which would have required surgery to correct. It is sometimes an extensive procedure. Thank you Google and Wikipedia; I am not that smart. That was a lot of big words.
What is still unresolved - since, we waited before having surgeries for the hernias, Wyatt still has not had the snip-snip on his manhood. I joked with Randi that we could have one boy with and one boy without, but that would be a cruel joke that would play out in the years to come. Wyatt still showed some white matter loss on his original brain MRI in the NICU. We may have another MRI down the road to check on that, but we may not. We found out yesterday that Wyatt has a case of Duane Syndrome, a rare, congenital disorder of eye movement. We will continue to also follow up with this over the next 6 months, but it doesn't appear that it will negatively impact his vision. We continue to work with a physical therapist and a infant development specialist, each once a week, to make sure he doesn't get too far behind his brother developmentally. They both should be hitting some big milestones in the upcoming months - sitting up, crawling, walking, etc - and his size puts him at a little disadvantage.
Other than that, he's is a healthy little boy. He went for his 6 month checkup yesterday and is now in the 10th percentile for weight. He is finally getting there. Before I say this I want you to know that we are not militant or anything, we have not gotten either of them vaccinated. It is something we are not comfortable with considering their prematurity, Wyatt's white matter loss in his brain, statistics that 1 in 93 male children are now Autistic, etc. We are keeping them relatively quarantined to large numbers of outsiders and are going to get them eventually, on our own terms, not on the required schedule. Randi was a pharma rep, we know how those clinical trials are conducted. Also, frankly, I do not want to tempt fate. They are developing very well, and we do not want to do anything to adversely affect that.
We were not really sure what to expect when we took the boys to see Santa at the local mall yesterday. It was a real testy day already, but we decided that it was now or never. We went as early as we could to get towards the front of the line. Who could know when the boys would decide that they had had enough. We had our new "My Tiny Hands" labels on their carriers just in case any stray hands found their way to pinching our children's cheeks. We were, as you would guess, quite the spectacle with innumerable "are those twins?" questions. I don't know how triplets, quads, or John & Kate + 8 do it.
We finally got to the front and handed Parks and Wyatt over to Santa Claus. They were like deer in headlights, as the pictures below show. There was no screaming, no crying, only utter disbelief that we would hand them over to a complete stranger and dangle toys in their face to perform. They looked at us like, "okay, what am I suppose to do now?" After a few minutes in the big guys lap, we paid for our pictures and left without incident. We were both relieved that they were both so tolerant.
The final product.
A live action shot.
Parks all dress up to go to town.
Wyatt, a little man in full.
Not the best photo from this night, but I love their faces.
The boys with a rare double smile captured on camera.After a couple of incidents this last week, Randi and I were recounting the several mishaps we have had with Parks and Wyatt over the six and a half months since their birth . Not too long after we brought Wyatt home and in the height of sleeplessness, I was feeding Wyatt during the 2 a.m. feed and deprivation got the best of me. I was sitting up in bed with him in my arms and dozed off for just a second. My grip loosened, and I dropped him onto the bed next to me, remember he is not much more than 4 pounds at this point. I immediately snapped out of it. It shocked me more than him I believe, and I had to explain myself to Randi when she woke up to him crying. Yet, another time we were playing on the sofa, and I was trying to get him to practice sitting up. He was doing well...for a while, before doing a nose dive into the arm of the sofa, which is luckily well-padded leather. Again, my shock was greater than his.
Just yesterday, Randi placed Wyatt in the swing in the living room. She did not fasten him in because I was in the room, and she was only leaving for a moment. I went into the kitchen for a second, not knowing that he was not fastened in, and heard a thump and a scream. Sure enough he had scooted his way out of the swing and was laying perpendicular to it on the rug. We checked him out and everything was okay. We could not even see where he might have fallen. It didn't take long to figure it out. A few minutes later, his nose had turned red. Thus, we deemed him the rug burn Rudolph. Hopefully, we will not hold all of this against us in adolescence.
Okay, so looking back, most everything has happened to Wyatt. I really can't think of too many times that anything has happened to Parks, but this is also the kid who loves to be thrown down onto the bed and tossed up into the air. He's a brute. Furthermore, Parks is now 18.5 pounds and 26 inches long and Wyatt is not far behind at 15.5 pounds and 25 inches long. That 3 pound gap sounds a lot better than the one between 2 pounds and 5 pounds at birth. They are becoming much more self-aware and it is starting to get really fun.
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