AUGUST 2018

     Between Talen's trip up to Primary's and school starting, I am surprised that we were able to get anything else fit into our busy lives.  Kennedy had Pine View Volleyball tryouts at the beginning of the month.  Originally we were told that it would only be 2 days, but at the end of each day, they told them that tryouts would be extended another day.  After 5 full days of tryouts, they finally posted the names of those who made the team.  Kennedy made it!!  It wasn't until school and practice started (that next Monday) that we learned she wouldn't be on the Freshman team, she was bumped up to the Sophomore team!  Then that next Wednesday after practice, I get a text from Kennedy telling me that she is no longer going to be on the Sophomore team, they bumped her up to JV!!  Oh, and by the way, JV and Varsity were leaving the next day for a tournament up in Salt Lake.  Kennedy was super nervous about going because she really didn't know anyone on either the JV or Varsity teams other than the two Seniors that were in our ward.  But, she went anyway and had a blast!  She loves the girls on her team (and the Varsity team) and they accepted her with open arms.  I am so happy that she is with such a good group of girls! (and I still can't believe that she is on the JV team as a Freshman - guess all that hard work is finally paying off!)

     On the 8th I took Carter in to see Dr. Thompson for his yearly checkup and shots.  At 5 years and 1 month old, Carter weighs 39 pounds 14 oz (in the 42 percentile) and is 3'8" tall (63 percentile).  He grew 3 inches taller since last year.  What a big boy I have!!
     On the 14th, Carter had his school assessment with Mrs. Wittwer.  This is so that they can see where the new Kindergartner is at (intellectually) and what areas they need to focus on while in Kindergarten.  Carter was actually quite a bit better than I expected.  He is such a smart little boy.  He knew all his letters and most of his number.  He is reading pretty good and his teacher was quite impressed.  After seeing his classroom and spending some time with his teacher, he seemed very excited to start going to school!
     On the 29th, Daxton and I went down to the school for parent teacher conference.  Daxton's teacher said that he is super smart and doing so well.  He set some goals for himself (learning his money/coins and working on his times tables) and had a treat when we left.  I knew that I liked his teacher, Mrs. Decker, but I really think she is a great fit for Dax.  Now hopefully he can make some good friends in this class since most of his friends ended up in different classes this year.

Talen's PICU trip #4

I can't believe that we are back here again!!  I really thought that Talen was past all this, but I guess not.  We were planning on heading up to Primary's on the 21st right after I got the kids off to school, but the night of the 20th was terrible and we couldn't get Talen to stop wiggling.  So, instead of waiting, I called Cathy to come get the kids to school and we headed for Salt Lake as soon as she got to the house.  We both knew what was coming - Talen would be admitted again.  But, since we were already planning on going to SLC for Talen's surgery, we decided to just drive up there as opposed to taking him into Dixie Regional and having him Life Flighted again.  The trip up was hard because Talen was struggling with the wiggles and vomited several times.  Not to mention that there had been some awful flooding and we ended up being stopped on the freeway for over 45 minutes while we waited for them to open the freeway again.  Once we got to Primary's we went straight to the ER where we sat for 5-6 hours waiting for them to decide that minor meds wouldn't work and we needed to start him on Presidex again. 

At this point, we had officially cancelled his spinal surgery.  We made it up to the PICU around 6:45 and finally found a dosage that got him to stop wiggling.  My parents made it to SLC just after Talen got relaxed.  So Jay and my Dad left to pick us up some dinner - Crown Burger.  Once we were done eating, they checked on Talen then Jay and my parents headed to the hotel while I stayed in the PICU.  The first night went pretty well, he slept most of the night.  His blood pressure got really low so they lowered the presidex and he did great for about an hour.  But, he eventually started wiggling again and they had to bump it back up.

On the 22nd (Wed) around 9 am, we were just trying to find a balance between wiggles and the presidex rate.  We finally landed on .8 of presidex (I guess that's good because last time we had to start on 1 - small victories, right?!?)  We had also checked his ck levels in the ER yesterday and they were at 215 and this morning, they were at 265.  We decided that there was no need to repeat labs because we don't feel that rhabdo is likely, yay!!  Jay decided that it'd be best for him to head home to help take care of our other kids so he left around 10 or so.  At 12:30 we had lowered the presidex to .7 and he was calm.  We started him back on regular feeds and were watching to make sure he could tolerate them.  At this point, we were hopeful that he could be released on Thursday, but Talen doesn't always like to have thing go as scheduled, so I'm planning on Friday.  At 6 pm, the presidex was down to .6 and we watched him through the night.

On the 23rd (Thurs) at 1:30 we lowered the presidex to .5 and again to .4 at 6 am.  By 9am he was doing great - still calm.  He had little bouts of the wiggles but I was able to hold his hands and he would stop.  The doctors wanted to keep at the same schedule - decreasing the presidex by .1 every 6 hours.  Then after he is completely off, they need him to stay calm for 6 hours to make sure he is good.  So things were looking like he'd be ready to go by afternoon of the next day.

On the 24th (Fri) we had gotten him off the presidex, but the night didn't go as well as I'd hoped.  He'd wiggle and stop all night long.  We only got maybe 1-2 hours of sleep.  As the morning wore on, his wiggles had got stronger and harder to stop.  Sadly, I had planned to go home that morning, so I had already told Jay to come get us.  It wasn't until 7:30 am that I finally remembered that the last time we supplemented his weening of the presidex with extra clonidine.  So, I grabbed the doctor and asked her to get some extra clonidine.  While we waited for the pharmacy, the doctors did their rounds.  They said that if the clonidine didn't help that we would have to get him back on the presidex.  He finally got the clonidine and was calm for about an hour and a half.  At noon (just as Jay got to the hospital) they restarted the presidex.  They wanted him on it for 24 hours before we start weening him again, so it was probably going to be a couple more days.  I felt so terrible that I had made Jay drive all the way back up to just turn around and go back home!!  He held Talen for 30 minutes or so, took me out to lunch, then headed back to St. George.  We had originally started the presidex back up at .5, but it wasn't quite enough and he started wiggling and spitting up his formula.  So, at 9 pm we bumped it up to .6.  Around 11 his heart rate dropped really low so we started backing off the presidex a little sooner than planned.  We put it at .5 and was able to keep steady at that all night, he still had a low heart rate, but they watched him really closely.

On the 25th (Sat) he woke up around 7 am and got a little wiggly.  But after a diaper change and a blanket (his toes were frozen) he calmed back down.  The doctors decided to change his clonidine patch in case the one that he had on was defective and maybe that was the reason this all started.  By 3:30 he had done great all day.  He had a couple wiggle moments, but he would calm down after a couple minutes.  The current plan was to give extra clonidine every 6 hours starting at 4.  At the second dose (10 pm) they wanted to start weening the presidex again.  At 6 we discovered that his IV was going bad, so they called to have a new one placed.  Of course, it went bad as soon as it was put in, so they had do to a 3rd IV.  He was super mad that they were doing it to him and he gave them an earful!  The doctors also decided to decrease the presidex every 4 hours instead of every 6.  At 6:30 he has at .4 so at that rate, he was scheduled to be off by morning.

On the 26th (Sun) he was off presidex by 8 am.  He had had a fantastic night - slept the whole night.  He wiggled a little bit, but was calm until the doctors walked in.  I really think that he was just nervous that he would be getting another IV, so whenever he saw the doctors he would get super agitated.  This, of course, made the doctors nervous because when he got agitated he would wiggle.  They wanted to just watch him for the day and maybe release him that night.  But, by 2 pm, I made an executive decision that I (and he) was ready to go.  He had been off the presidex and was agitated, but I really felt like it was something that I'd be able to handle at home.  So, at 2 pm I called Jay and told him to come back.  He got the Primary's around 7pm and we jumped in the car and booked it for home.  Jay held Talen while I drove and we pulled into our driveway just after midnight!

The surgery has now been officially rescheduled for Sept 27.  I'm not thrilled that it's right before Kennedy's birthday, but as long as Talen is doing better, I just want to get this all over with!  Fingers crossed he gets better fast and stays healthy until the 27th!!



 

Before the Surgery

Before we took Talen up north to have his big spinal fusion surgery, we had Jay's family come over to help give Talen a blessing.  It is nice to have so much love and support!  It's times like this when it is nice to have family live so close - we can call on them and they will show up in a moments notice!  What a fun group of kiddos we have in this family!!

School Starts

Well, it's that time of year again!  I can't believe that summer is over already!!  Kennedy is now a Freshman!!  Can I just say how weird this is?!?!  I remember when I was a Freshman - she can't be that old yet!!  So crazy!!  She is still going to Pineview Middle, which was quite a trial because Crimson Middle School opened this year and she was really torn as to which school to attend.  But after talking and talking and talking, she finally decided that it would be best for her to continue to go to Pineview.  Still not sure what she will do next year when Crimson High School opens, but for now, we are still Panthers. 

We decided to have Talen wait to start school until after his spinal surgery.  No point in sending him to school for a week then have him pulled out for a month.  So, we are just postponing his starting until after he is all healed and cleared to go.  Fingers crossed that will be some time mid-September.

Daxton is in 2nd grade at Riverside Elementary.  His teacher is Mrs. Decker (we love her, she had Talen in 2nd grade too).  This year he is officially in the gifted and talented class - our little smarty pants!!  He's super excited to be back to school and can't wait to make all sorts of new friends.

Carter doesn't start until next week because the first week of school for Kindergartners is testing week.  But, his teacher is Mrs. Wittwer (love her too, Dax had her for Kindergarten) and he will go in the mornings from 9 am - 11:45 am.  He's so cute because Mrs. Wittwer came to our house to meet Carter and tell him that she was excited to have him in her class and after she left, he kept calling her Mrs. Brent (that was Daxton's 1 grade teacher - I guess he really talked about her a lot because Carter keeps thinking that he gets her as his teacher - maybe next year!)  So excited for this new journey for my little Carter Sauce!

Wet N Wild with the Syphus Family

Lynn Syphus had been asking me about season passes to Wet N Wild because he knew that we bought them every year (and we have taken his daughter Lauryn on more than one occasion).  So, we decided to invite their family to come along with us to our August trip to Wet N Wild.  It was so much fun!!  Before going into the park, we ate a little lunch out in the parking lot.  Then, we let the kids run wild.  Their girls were nice enough to let our boys tag along with them on all of the rides.  The adults spent most of the day just floating around the lazy river - which is the best part of Wet N Wild anyway.  We stayed until we were all water logged and ready to be done with the water.  We stopped at Cafe Zupas (for the girls) and Raising Canes (for the boys) on the way home.  It was so much fun that we almost forgot to take pictures.  We did remember to snap this one before we left the park.  Oh, I forgot to mention that Kennedy wasn't able to come with us because she had to stay for volleyball tryout (they extended tryouts two days longer than they had originally told everyone that they would).  She was pretty bummed that she couldn't come and so were we!

Daxton wins the Novice Summer Series

The Virgin BMX Track decided to hold a Summer Series for 8 weeks during the summer.  They split all the riders into 4 groups: Expert, Intermediate, Novice, and Balance Bike.  They kept a running total of each of the riders points for the 8 weeks and gave a plaque to the top 3 riders in each category.  Daxton's first week was awful, but starting week 2 he really started to ride.  He ended up winning 5 of the next weeks and came in 2nd on the other 2.  We kept watching the points and he was in 2nd place clear up until the last week.  On week 8, the rider in 1st place didn't make it to the races, which bumped Dax into 1st!!  We were jumping up and down when they finally posted the winners and Dax came in 1st!!  Can I also mention that there were 64 riders in the Novice class, by far the biggest class of the 4 groups.  We were super proud of Dax!!  This really boosted his confidence.  So thankful for Virgin BMX and Adam Pace for continuing to provide a fun, safe place for our boys to ride.  Great Job Daxie!!