The Big 2-0

On the 19th, Skylar will be 20 months old! It's so crazy how time flies... Daddy has a birthday on the 18th this month too :) We love you Kyle!

So I thought we were smooth sailing once we were home from the hospital, but Skylar has had a few issues come and go since we've been home.

The first happened a few days after being home when I vented her belly. I use a 60ml (2 ounce) syringe without the plunger in it, hook it up to her g-tube, and let air and left over belly fluids flow out. I will typically let all of the belly contents (aka residual) back in her belly. However, this time, a dark black brown liquid came out of her g-tube that looked like diarrhea and freaked me out. I did not let that go back in. I have seen white and clear contents (normal), and even yellow and green residual colors (not so normal) but black and brown?! I was immediately on the phone with our pediatrician and we both agreed that we'd start on pedialyte and go from there. What the heck did people do before pedialyte?!?!

The pedialyte seemed to clear things up and everything was back to normal again. Or so we thought. The past week, Skylar has had a really high heart rate, which is never good. It's usually a sign of discomfort and pain, and even the start of an illness. I think we're battling something right now. At first, I wrote off the high heart rate as a teething thing because there were no other symptoms. She was kind of congested, but no fever or anything else. Her belly was still digesting well and normal - that is, until yesterday when we got a batch of yellow residual. The good news is we have a symptom and a possible cause of the discomfort.

We've already increased her treatments to every four hours and do our best to make sure she's completely comfortable with tylenol around the clock. We're going to try a few things this week (new meds) and re-evaluate at the end of the week to see if anything improves or if we need to take a new course of action. We really really don't want to go back to the hospital so hopefully that won't be necessary.

I feel like I should mention the Extreme Home Makeover because a lot of people have asked about it. I first want to say that those little girls are extremely deserving of a new home and we are so happy that they are able to go to Disney and have this experience. We are definitely bummed, but have learned a lot through the entire process (over a year now) and are so thankful for the friends and family we have who support us. I hate to think where we would be without you so thanks! We will eventually build on the property we bought 3 years ago... Hopefully sooner than later! Stay tuned :)