Okay so let's try to do this by sequence of events.
First of all, here is a long overdue video of Isaac's first play date on May 12th. Its of him and Disa, his NICU friend and its before things turned "ugly" for Isaac. ; )
Here is a picture of daddy taking Isaac on the slide for the first time.
On May 13th, we dedicated Isaac at church. Here is a video of the tail end of the dedication including Pastor Dennis' prayer.The following week, our friends who used to live in Tokyo and former neighbors at our old apartment building Chris, Sabina and their little girl Alyssa stayed with us for a week. It turns out that Baby Isaac (as Alyssa calls him) likes older women. ^_^ I think Alyssa and Isaac had a very good time with each other. Isaac was always trying to follow Alyssa when he could (by crawling) and when he couldn't follow her physically, his eyes will track where she goes.
Here are some cute pictures of Alyssa and Isaac together:
Alyssa went to Tokyo Disneyland and picked up that all these Japanese would put up the V sign with their fingers when they take pictures. Well, apparently, Alyssa is born cool so she did a much cooler version of the V sign. ^_^
Sabina also took some nice pictures of Isaac so here are a couple:
We also celebrated Jong's birthday on May 23th. Here are pictures of Isaac's wishes for his daddy's birthday.
And a picture of Jong and our friends Chris and Sabina eating his birthday cake late that night.
Here is a really, really cute video of Isaac crawling and standing from tonight. He can crawl very fast now and I just love how his cute little butt wiggles left, right, left, right when he crawls fast. He can stand up pretty well now just putting his hands on a flat surface. We are waiting for him to start cruising a bit more and after that, we may finally have to throw all of Jong's junk away (for those of you who don't know Jong is one of the biggest pack rat I have ever met) and pad our whole apartment up because who knows what things will be like when Isaac starts walking and then running!I do have a few prayer requests. Will you please pray for Isaac's speech. He is still not making a lot of sounds and is generally very quiet unless he is unhappy about something and wants to whine or complain. But even then, he is usually just going eh, eh, eh still. When he is really, really unhappy, once in a blue moon, he will utter two syllable sounds with a soft consonant. So far, I have only heard the following once or twice each: uuuuugaa or uuuuuuma.
This is kind of a prayer request and a praise at the same time. A lot of people have been coughing in my office including a colleague I work closely with. I caught the cough virus last week and Isaac start coughing within half a day of me. He got pretty phlegmy and his O2 sat levels started dropping on Thursday so that we actually had to start putting the nasal cannular back on him even during the day. We took him to Dr. Che on Saturday but he seemed generally well apart from the coughing so we decided to take a wait and see approach. By Sunday afternoon, he started getting back more energy and his sat levels improved a bit. We still need to put his nasal cannular on when he sleeps and when he naps but he is doing better even though his sats are hovering more around 95 and 96 rather than high 90s. He was supposed to have his pseudo sleep study done this week where the nurse from St. Luke's was going to bring over a special O2 saturation level monitor that records his sat levels overnight and we were going to record his sat levels one night with the nasal cannular and one night without. However, since he still needs his supplemental O2, we are going to postpone that for now. Please pray for Isaac to completely recover soon so we can see if he can go off of O2 completely soon. We have been hoping to be able to travel back to the US in August but it will be contingent upon him being completely off of O2. The good news is that for this little bug so far (assuming his condition doesn't get worse again) he has been able to recover on his own without meds.
What else is new? Oh yes. He is finally cutting teeth and they all seem to be coming out at the same time, his bottom front teeth, his top front teeth and may be even one more tooth on his top left hand side. They just emerged out of his gums about a week ago.
Oh and here is a strange thing that I cannot figure out. Some of you may know of a series of Christian baby videos similar to the Baby Einstein videos called "God Made Me" "God Made Animals" and "God Made Music". Isaac usually loves the DVDs even though we don't show them that often. However, because he wasn't breathing well over the weekend and I needed to keep him more still so he could breathe better (he will sit very still and be completely absorbed in the videos when I show him the DVDs but otherwise, he is almost always moving). Anyway, I started the God Made Me video and very shortly after the video started, he started crying quite hard. Now please remember that our baby does not cry that often. Even when he gets injections, he only cries for a little while and he stops. I wasn't playing full attention but did notice about when he started crying. I showed the same video again on Sunday with him on my lap and he started crying at about the same point of the video. Its this scene where there is a black/dark background with a bunch of blurry white lights in the foreground when the narrator is explaining that God made light. For some reason, this really, really scares Isaac. After this, I recall that the same thing had happened before with the same video and I had just forgotten about it. I wonder if that scene reminded Isaac of something scary when he was in NICU. I don't know what his 2-3 hour laser eye surgery was like. I imagine it was very scary. He also still has nightmares quite regularly. I am starting to think that at least for now, he still does remember his NICU days. Poor little guy!
Anyway, its getting late so I better go for now.
Take care and God bless,
Sonia
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6 comments:
Mom also thought you haven't updated in a month, and I set her straight saying that your last update was May 12, so not a month. :)
Thsnks for updating!!
He looks so good. He is doing wonderful!! Thanks for the update.
Nancy
Oh, I love all the videos! If you do come to the US, and you visit southern CA, I would love to visit with you guys if you are available :). I'll be sending prayers for Isaac. He is doing so well! Take care!
Bout time!
This Kiwi Aunty was about to go thru withdrawl.
Hugs and love to our little soldier
Love ya my bffttsolfohb
Paula
Hallie has so many of the same issues that Isaac has (both good and bad). They both seem to be doing GREAT in terms of motor skills for 23 weekers (she's also crawling, trying to pull up, sitting, etc etc and doing a lot of stuff with her toys and hands) but they both seem to be slow on the speech (she has "ays" and "yays" and "ohs" but only an occasional "ga" or "er" sound sneaking in. She squeals a lot but makes few consonant sounds and no babbles). She also has a lot of teeth coming in at once (definitely two bottom, maybe another 2-4 on bottom and two on top). And is thus VERY congested (on top of just being sick). Anyway, we were concerned enough about her speech (and eating problems) and thought that in part it has to do with a high palate and narrow epiglottis both of which are probably related to being intubated so long (9.5 weeks). We pushed and finally got okayed for Speech Therapy. Do you guys have that in Japan? If so, I'd try to get Isaac enrolled in it and if not, just let me know if you want me to pass along any tricks or exercises we learn.
I wish I had been there for the dedication ceremony! Isaac IS very cute crawling. His butt is so cute! ^_^ Great to see Sabina, Chris and Alyssa too! Wow, Alyssa really grew big, hasn't she?
SL
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