Hope Update: 5 months

Hope is 5 months old today! Can you believe it?

She had her first physical therapy evaluation on Monday. It went well, and I liked the women that I was working with. The people who do the evaluation are different from the actual PT who will work with Hope, but even the evaluator gave me a few ideas of things to do differently with her.

Hope is a couple months behind, which is about what we were expecting. She came in at the physical and cognitive level of a 2-3 month old. However, the therapist made a point of telling me that she thinks Hope's cognitive delays are due to her physical limitations, and will go away as soon as Hope gains better muscle strength and control. In the picture above, she is reaching for a toy, which she has just started doing in the past few days. Her movements are very jerky, which the therapist said is to be expected with damage to the cerebellum.
Hope loves people and faces. She is very expressive when you sit and talk to her. She's vocalizing, and will make noises with you. She loves Ellie, although she responds differently to Ellie than she does to me. I think she somehow knows that Ellie's a firecracker who might explode at any moment :)

While her neck control is getting better, it was by far her lowest scoring area on the evaluation. She's just starting to hold her head up when you hold her to your shoulder, and even then she's pretty wobbly.

While it is clear that she's seeing us and able to track, her eyes cross a fair amount. The therapist thought that this might just be due to muscle fatigue. She looks at something for a little while, and then after a bit, her head goes down and her eyes cross. Poor kid--she's tired!



One area where she's clearly excelling is eating and growing. She's a chunk, weighing in at 17 1/2 lbs. I love carrying my babies around, but she's so heavy and so floppy that we're starting to think about stroller options that will work for her. If you have a stroller that you love that would work for an infant (since she is still so floppy), but doesn't involve a snap-in car seat, let me know!

Hope is a super sweet baby. She is by far our easiest baby, which is the Lord's mercy to me! She is happy in her car seat, she loves a bouncer that I've been borrowing from Delene, and she's happy to sit in her baby seat and listen as I do school with the big girls. While we still don't know what the days ahead look like, we're so grateful to God for giving her to us!

Home Tour: The Dining Room

The dining room is still one of my works-in-progress. Things I love? The table. The rug. The huge windows. The chandelier. The picture rail.

Things that need some work? The pictures in the frames on the picture rail. Storage. And something to absorb sound.



You can see the trunk at one end of the dining room. It's housing pantry items that I can't fit into the pantry--mostly baking goods: sugar, flour, etc. I think I'll probably center it along that wall, in between the windows. Along the wall with the big window in the middle, I would like to put two of these on either side of the window. I think they would break up the wall, add a splash of color to a room that's very blue-and-gold, and provide some much-needed storage space for china, canned goods, and other misc. items. They would also give me a horizontal surface to put some decorative accents on. But, I've got to convince my husband first :) He's not sold on the red yet. And for sound-absorbtion, I'm going to add curtains at some point. I'm not sure when that'll happen: it's not really high on the priority list, both for decorating funds and my time. But I did find some fabric that I would love to use for curtains, if I get to them any time soon. This would make wonderfully graphic curtains and be a strong counterpart to the yellow walls.

Home Tour: The Kitchen

Here's the room I should've started with: the kitchen.

As you can see, the kitchen is beautiful. It has great brown tile which hides an abundance of dirt and kitchen debris, lovely stainless steel appliances, and beautiful cabinets. As far as functionality goes, it's great there too--it has a gas oven and range, which I LOVE, and big fridge, and even a teeny-tiny bathroom tucked in one corner (it's on the right-hand side of the last picture, next to the door out to the backyard). It was a little lacking in space, though, so we had to get creative to figure that out. As you can see, one of the cabinets is missing a door. It was one of those in-cabinet trash cans, which I abhor. They are disgusting. The grime on that thing was super thick, so thick that the drawer wouldn't open smoothly at all. So we pulled it out, cleaned up the cabinet door, and are still working on installing the hardware to put it back on. Doing that gained me an extra bottom cabinet, which helped, but we still needed more.

We decided to use on of my antique dresses as a DIY island in the middle of the kitchen. We bought $10 Ikea butcher-block cutting boards and put them up-side-down on the top of the dresser (with a layer of carpet non-skid stuff underneath) to add more counter space. I use the drawers for storage of spices and kitchen linens. But the back is the best part:

A couple of evenings with some chalkboard paint, and I've got a kitchen kid-distraction that they all love! The back of the dresser was painted a hideous pink, so it was not hard at all to start swiping away with primer and paint. And the kids LOVE it. And I'm super excited that I had the gray matter to come up with the idea :)

Here's the view looking down from the pass-through that leads to the living room. The step-stool is the same one that's up in the blue room (I have two), and it's the perfect size for kids to pull over and help with dinner prep.

The door in the back leads out to the backyard, and the pass-through to the dining room has been wonderful. I'm still working out the bugs of learning new appliances, but we're getting there. Today I was cooking grape jelly (from real grapes!) on the stove and home-made refried beans in the crockpot--both ideas from Delene :) I'm looking forward to making applesauce here in a month, hopefully finding some peaches for peach butter, and super-excited about Thanksgiving! We're hoping to rustle up some stray college students to fill our table up, and I'm guessing we won't have any trouble!