My Lou

My little babe is growing up so fast!  I wish I could just freeze her at the  age she is right now.  I love this age!  She is so much fun and is doing the cutest things.  Like waving.  She waves at everyone!  Everyone she sees at the grocery store gets a wave.  If you say, "Hi Jilly!", she waves.  When I go to get her from her crib in the morning and after naps, the first thing she does is smile and wave.  I love it!  It is seriously the cutest thing.  Here are a few photos I snapped of my girl the other day.

 

 Love, love, love her blue eyes.

She's also a clapper.  All we have to say is "Yay!" and she claps like crazy. 

 This girl is into absolutely everything!  You can't take your eyes off her for a single second!  And when you find her getting into naughty things, she usually gives you her best grin and either waves or claps.  She's way too cute to ever be mad at.  ;)   There are a couple of things I have found though that will keep her occupied for a time.

She loves playing in her car seat these days.  She'll play in it forever!  Which is funny to me considering she screams bloody murder every time I try to put her in it when we go to leave.  She also loves to look out the front windows.  I will raise the blinds up, stand her in front of the window, and she'll just hang out there for a good 30 minutes.  I can get a lot of stuff done in 30 minutes.

 She LOVES her bath time!  By the time she is done in the bath, I don't think there is a dry spot in the whole bathroom.  She is such a splasher!  I usually have to drape a towel over myself so I don't end up completely soaked.

 Little Miss Bean wants to be a big kid.  She watches every move the other kids make, and you can see in her face she wants to follow right along so bad!  I'm sure it won't take her long.

 Especially once she starts walking.  She's getting really close.  She can stand all on her own, she is just hesitant to take that first step without someone's hand to hold onto.  Take your time Jillybean.  Take your time.

 Twinners.  She sure loves her grandma.

 If you look really close in this picture, you can see that her left pupil is slightly larger than her right one.  The first time I noticed this was when she was about three weeks old.  I watched it over the next few days.  I looked a few things up on Google, (I know, stupid, stupid) and after reading some scary things, I called the doctor's office to see if I should be concerned.  They had me come in right away, which of course made me even more scared.  The Dr. checked her and rechecked her.  Then she had another Dr. come in and take a look, just to get a second opinion.  They didn't see anything outwardly wrong, so they told me, just to be on the safe side, to take her to a specialist, and referred me to a group of doctors.  We went in two weeks later.  It was the absolute worst Dr. visit I have ever been to.  They had to dilate Jilly's eyes.  Poor baby.  They do it a slower way for babies than they would for kids or an adult.  It took three different eye drops over the course of 45 minutes.  The Dr. was very abrupt and cold.  I don't think she ever looked me in the eye more than twice in the 2-3 hours I was there.  And her manner with Jilly was horrible.  After so long of being poked and prodded my poor 5 week old baby had had enough, and the Dr. had no patience with her.  Instead of trying to help me sooth the poor babe, she said to the nurse, "We're just going to have to hold her down."  After doing each of the tests, she and the nurse would turn away and type things in to the computer and whisper.  I have never been more uncomfortable, or nervous.  After she had done the tests that she needed to do, she told me that it could be a few things.  She told me it could just be the way her eyes were, or it could be Horners Syndrome.  She named another thing, but I can't remember it any more.  She told me I would need to bring Jilly back in 2-3 weeks so they could do more eye drop tests.  We couldn't do them that day because her eyes had already been dilated.  She also told me that we would probably have to do an MRI.  Do you know that to do and MRI on a baby, you have to sedate them?  AAH!  She said they wanted to check and make sure there was normal brain activity.  I was starting to really freak out at this point.  I had never heard of Horners Syndrome, so I asked her what it was and she told me to go home and look it up on the internet.  I held it together just until I got to the car, then it was like Niagara Falls was pouring down my face.  Trent was out of town of course, and I couldn't reach him.  My mother-in-law called just as I had finished leaving a message for Trent to see how the appointment went, which started a whole new round of tears.  I love my mother-in-law.  She talked me down off the ledge so-to-speak and reassured me.  It's amazing I made it home okay considering I could barely see through the haze of tears that wouldn't seem to stop flowing.  After saying lots of prayers and crying a lot the rest of the day, I decided I needed to get out and stop moping around the house, so I packed up Jilly and Preston and we headed to Target.  I ended up with a lot of chocolate and ice cream in my cart.  While there, I just happened to run into a friend of ours that is a Dr.  (When I say "just happened to" I really mean Heavenly Father had heard and answered my prayers.)  I'm sure my eyes were still red-rimmed and puffy, and it was all I could do to hold back the tears when he said, "How are you guys doing?" (Why is it, when you're already on the verge of tears, it's SO HARD not to burst out crying when someone asks you an innocent question like, "How are you?"  Am I the only one like that?!)  Anyway,  I told him we were pretty good (totally lying).  I knew if I told him the truth, I would start crying again.  I had cried enough for one day.  We talked for a minute about how his family was, then the thought came to me that I needed to ask him if he knew of a good pediatric ophthalmologist.  He didn't know of any personally, but he said he would ask around and get back to me.  True to his word, he called Trent the next morning with the name of THE pediatric ophthalmologist to see.  Funny enough, he is in the same group of doctors as the Dr. we saw previously.  He is actually the head of the group.  We cancelled our appointment with the other Dr. and made an appointment to see him the next week.  The weekend before Jilly's next appointment, we held a family fast for her.  I have never fasted and prayed so hard in my whole life.  This new Dr. was a very quiet man.  He didn't say a whole lot, but his demeanor was completely different to that of the other Dr.  From the minute he walked in the room, he looked us in the eye, he was very calming, he answered any questions we asked, and he opted not to dilate Jilly's eyes again.  He felt it was unnecessary.  When Jilly started to fuss, he sang and hummed to her and she calmed right down.  The whole appointment was completely different.  By the end, he felt like it was best to keep an eye on her and bring her in for regular appointments.  He said he didn't see any of what the other Dr. had seen, and that he felt there were too many risks to putting a baby that little under anesthesia for an MRI when Jilly seemed to be doing just fine.  Nothing to him indicated that there was anything wrong with her.  His opinion was that she was just born with one pupil larger than the other.  Heavenly Father sure answered our prayers.  After going in for regular check-ups over the next several months and still seeing nothing of concern, we now get to wait a whole year for her next appointment!  Yay!  I'm grateful for the many ways Heavenly Father answered our prayers through this time.  I am especially grateful for such a sweet, healthy, happy baby!

Love you Lou.  Thanks for filling our days with such joy and laughter!