7 months and......teeth!

So, a day before he turned 7 months old, Oliver's 2 bottom middle teeth finally pushed through! I was working with him and his sippy cup/eating and I saw a flash of white! A quick probe confirmed my suspicions, we have teeth! :) It made perfect sense that they came in when they did, a couple days before he was ULTRA grouchy.....No more chewing on fingers for Oliver - that will actually hurt now! No pictures of them yet, he won't let me get a good one :)

All in all, Oliver is doing really well. Yesterday morning, we went to his surgeon, Dr. Cosper, for a check-up and he looks great! When Oliver was first diagnosed with HD we knew it would be at least 9 months - 1 year before he could have his pull-through surgery but after talking to Dr. Cosper today, it will be longer than that. Oliver is definitely thriving and doing really well in terms of his health.....but, it would be better to do the pull-through after Oliver is eating by mouth. His ostomy output will change a lot as the food he eats and feeding changes so we'll wait to get through that until doing the surgery. So we are looking at sometime in 2011.....maybe closer to his 2nd birthday but we'll see. But, he don't have to go back to see Dr. Cosper until Oliver's 1st birthday!

We are also having to adjust his ostomy bags, the ones that we were using are just too small now and he can easily loosen those enough by grabbing them and also because he is sitting up now so much that we were having to do bag changes at least every 24 hours.....not ideal! So, we are trying larger sizes......

Oliver will go see the GI doctor (Dr. Dranove) in 2 weeks.....We are still working on getting him to eat by mouth. We have bypassed the bottle.....he just wasn't interested and wouldn't take it. So, now we are working on a sippy cup with him and that has already worked much better. I am also working on feeding him a little bit of rice cereal and bananas......but there isn't too much progress to report as yet. At least not to anyone but us :) Each bite he takes without spitting it right back out is exciting and we only get a few of those a day.....so, when I have more news, I'll be sure to share but I have a feeling that this is going to be a long process.

This past weekend, Oliver had his first trip up to Blowing Rock! Owen and I hadn't been up since October so it was wonderful to get back up there! We also got to see Jack's new apartment and just hang out and relax. It was wonderful to not have to do anything or be anywhere and just enjoy the mountains......Mom and I took Oliver and went up Thursday afternoon and Owen and Dad joined us Saturday morning. It was interesting because Boz (my parents' dog) gets a little agitated whenever Oliver gets all the attention at their house but he didn't care at all this weekend....Jack said it right - Blowing Rock lowers everyone's blood pressure :) I was too relaxed to get many pictures this weekend but here are a few......