Coming home from vacation really sucks. I've always hated it, but coming back from our week-long vacation to San Diego last week was especially hard for me (I'll leave my comments about the trip to the end of the post). I think there are several reasons why it was so difficult to come home (other than the normal "we had a great time" and "it was nice and cool"):
- On the trip we were (for the most part) just a normal family; no therapies, no doctor visits for Sophie.
- We got to spend some good time with my brother and his family. I really miss them!
- Since I work from home most of the time, I spend 95% of my time here; getting away from the messy house for a whole week was luxurious.
- The vacation was long overdue.
And going to a genetics appointment on Monday morning was a tough reminder of what our "normal" life is these days. Sophie's geneticist is going to test Sophie for Kabuki Syndrome. He said it is in no way a diagnosis at this time, but it does fit a lot of Sophie's medical issues and a few physical characteristics. It is named for the Japanese Kabuki dancers who do their makeup to make their eyes look long. Long eyes has always been a striking characteristic for Sophie. It will be a few months before we get any results, so I'm trying not to worry about it too much, but at the same time preparing myself if we do get a diagnosis.
And speaking of Sophie's eyes, since I last wrote Sophie has gone to the eye doctor. I had found an eye lash that was growing right next to her eyeball and was constantly in her eye. After consulting with a friend of ours who is an opthmalogist I ended up pulling it out with tweezers (and to think, with Owen I was afraid to cut his nails!). A few days later we saw Sophie's eye doctor, who said the eye lash was nothing to worry about, but he noticed she was crossing her eyes, which is a problem at her age. He diagnosed her with congenital esotropia, which means that one of her eyes tends to look inward. She has to wear an eye patch on the good eye for 1.5 hours a day for 4 weeks in the hopes that it will strengthen the muscles connected to the bad eye. Good news is that her eye sight is fine right now; bad news is that this could mean surgery on her eye (which my friend assures me is not a difficult surgery so I shouldn't worry).
As for Owen, we are trying (with some success) to convert him to "Independent Owen" (a term we actually use with him). His teacher said we need to teach him to go to the bathroom by himself. We had been reading to him on the potty and helping him with each step of the process. We took the opportunity of the vacation to change things; we stopped reading to him and tried to teach him how to dress himself. When we got home Keith sat down with him and explained that he was getting older and needs to start doing things on his own. He still sometimes throws a tantrum when we try and get him to do some stuff on his own, but giving him a lot of praise for when he does seems to be working. Vacation did mess up his record of sleeping through the night, but we expected that. This is all at the same time we are discontinuing use of the star chart, mainly because we ran out of the Cars that we gave as prizes.
Now on to the good part. Our vacation was great! We stayed in Carlsbad at a condo right across the street from the beach (it was a time share week from my parents; they stayed on their boat). My brother lives in San Diego, so it was great to see him and his family, and to celebrate cousin Ben's birthday. We took the kids sailing for the first time, went to Sea World, picked strawberries, played on the beach, played a lot of card games with Owen (Go Fish, War and Crazy Eights), and my Dad and I took standup paddleboarding lessons. I hesitate to call it relaxing, since we did go with a 3 year old and 10 month old after all, but we certainly did enjoy ourselves. The kids did pretty well, especially given the fact that Sophie was teething (her tooth popped through yesterday), although you could tell Owen was ready to go home towards the end of the week. Here's some highlights, with more pictures posted on our Picasa site.
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