Winding Down....

 Another semester of school is drawing to a close. The final class is now just two short weeks away, followed shortly by graduation (YIPPEE!) and then a blissful almost 4 months of school free living before (hopefully) the rest of the path to realizing my true goal begins. The applications have long been turned in, the grades and tests necessary for admittance submitted. Now my dreams are no longer in my hands...and its its own sort of Hell to be waiting to find out if those dreams will blossom to fruition or whither on the vine for yet another year. I have long felt that God called me to become a nurse and the time has come for me to fully trust that if that truly is His wish, He will open the doors necessary for me to become one. I put in the work (sometimes more than I thought myself capable of, amid a cacophony of distractions which could have fully excused my giving up....). The rest is in His hands, which is where I have tried to leave it......
The boys will be finishing school at the end of May...and at the beginning of June, we will all be heading south toward the sandy white beaches of Destin once again.

 John and I have been together several times (4 to be exact...almost once a year, with the exception of the summer I was pregnant) but this will be the first time we have taken either of our boys. I always feel more myself with sand in my toes, salt on my skin and the warm ocean breeze blowing my hair and I am looking forward to sharing that experience with ALL of my kids this time. Hoping that the Princess finds that she enjoys the beach more this year, post OHS, than she did last year...mainly because I am really longing for some time just laying on the beach, watching my babies frolic in the water. :)

 The plan is to stay in Destin for about 4 days, and then head across the state to the East coast for a 5 day visit with Dad and Diane......where most of our time will be spent lounging by his pool, I'm sure. All in all, I think that it will be an awesome family trip (except for the lonnnnnggg drives!), the longest we have taken together since John and I got married almost 3 years ago.
Liddy got her amazing butterfly standing braces this week.....which are already making a marked improvement in her standing skills.

 The first day she stood with assistance for almost 15 minutes straight, which is by far the longest (before we were lucky if she would stand for a minute!) time we have accomplished so far. I wonder on a regular basis nowadays if she will ever crawl..or if she'll just go straight to walking. She just doesn't seem to show a big interest in the crawling, since she can roll wherever she wants to go with much less effort. Either way, we're ready to move on...the path just isn't quite clear enough to see which way we'll be moving yet.

 We started speech therapy twice a month two weeks ago...and since Liddy has been going through some major separation anxiety over the last month or so, I was a nervous wreck about how adding someone new would work out. I had spent the two weeks prior doing the therapy with her, since she refused to let either of her two therapists touch her without having a major meltdown. Thankfully, at least for that first visit, the new therapist was willing to just let Liddy sit and play without trying to get her to do much, so it went much smoother than I had even thought to hope! We seem to finally be moving out of her fear of the other two, slowly, so hopefully that little phase is coming to an end (and maybe she'll start letting Grandma hold her when she's here again too!)

This month has been the month of appointments. We had a 15 month check up a couple of weeks ago, which I am beyond proud to say showed that little Miss Princess HAS been growing in length (an entire inch since the last time we got what I would call an "accurate" measurement) and she finally broke the 17 lb mark (weighing in at a whopping..haha...17.2 lbs). This past week was our followup with both cardio (for an echo to check her pulmonary hypertension) and with the pacemaker clinic (to check her pacemaker and make any adjustments necessary to its running). The echo (was not fun.....you try keeping an extremely active 15 month old still for over 30 minutes..which btw turned out to be actually more like 90!) showed that while the PH has decreased slightly, its still about 15 percent over what we want it to be. No intervention yet. We will recheck it in another 3 months and hope that its down to at least 30% then, which would be close enough to the 25% goal that hopefully we won't need to go back on medication for it. The pacemaker looked great...and doc says she should be good to go on that battery for about 3-4 more years, even though she's still using it all the time. We've moved on to phone in checks every 3 months now, instead of every month, which makes just one less appointment we have to deal with keeping track of!

 She now has two teeth..both of her top one year molars. She refuses to eat anything resembling baby food any more....and quite frankly refuses to eat anything that doesn't come from our plates, unless its something sweet, in which case she gladly makes exceptions. She's still hanging on with her 7 words that she uses regularly...but we are starting to hear her say a few more here and there. She learned that bouncing on the bed is quite fun and I seem to catch her, sitting up and bouncing on the bed after I have put her down for the night on a regular basis nowadays. Funny thing about that....at first she would clap when I caught her. But after I told her therapists that she was capable of transitioning from lying down to sitting on her own, she now won't look me in the eye when I catch her....like she thinks if she doesn't look at me, I'm not there, which cracks me up! Such a sassy one, this teeny girl, and that sassiness never ceases to make her mama smile (except when it morphs into pure toddler attitude instead ha!)

Looking forward to getting back into the blogging groove when the next two weeks are over! I have missed it...and I have missed all of your comments too (as well as reading YOUR blogs! I am so behind!!!)