Shelby's Baptism

Merry Christmas!

Shelby was the baby Jesus at our church's Christmas Eve service last night. All the children that come get to choose whether they want to be a shepherd, magi, or angel and take part in the service. Harding made a pretty cute king with the crown falling down onto his neck. He couldn't stand to be so far away from the "holy family" when we walked in with Shelby, so he inched his way over when everyone was singing "Away In a Manger" and stood on the stage with us. It was perfect and we made a great holiday memory. More pictures to come soon. Merry Christmas everyone!

Shelby's Vision

First I want to say that yesterday during PT, Shelby tracked Beth's face with just her eyes for the first time!! This is a really big deal for two reasons. 1) The face is very complicated to look at and Shelby usually tracks solid, shiny or light-up things, and 2) This is the first time she has tracked while moving her eyes only and not her head. Beth and I actually teared up....it was so exciting!

Our ophthalmologist appointment was this morning with Dr. Bashinsky. First, they did a functional visual assessment to get an estimate of Shelby's vision. The ortho-optist held up different cards with a black and white pattern on them that got smaller with each card. She determined that Shelby's vision is roughly 20/360 (which is better than we expected). This is only an estimate because Shelby obviously can't talk and tell us what she is seeing and how she sees things (but, oh how I wish she could). Anyway, to give everyone a reference, legally blind is 20/200 vision or worse. But we have already seen significant improvement with Shelby's vision and are expecting that to continue. Hopefully one day, she won't be considered legally blind.

Dr. Bashinsky then dilated Shelby's eyes to look at her optic nerves. The optic nerves looked the same as it did 3 months ago and Dr. Bashinsky doesn't expect there to be any more damage. A couple other things: Shelby is still far-sighted, has a nystagmus (the eyes sometimes dance around), and strabismus (slightly crossed eyes). At around a year of age, we may look at some patching of Shelby's right eye to strengthen the left. Also, if she is still measuring far-sighted at that time, she'll get glasses to help with that. And the doctor may consider surgery to correct the strabismus when Shelby is two years old if she thinks that will help her vision at that time.

Overall, we're pretty happy about the results of this appointment. We know she is seeing things and that her vision will keep getting better!

Shelby and Beth doing some PT!

Shelby tracking Beth's face

Shelby and Daddy at the Ophthalmologist's

Neurologist appt. and EEG

We went to see Shelby's neurologist on December 14th and he scheduled a routine EEG for last Thursday. Dr. Poplawski's nurse called us this afternoon with the results. The EEG showed intermittent slowing of Shelby's brain waves in the area of her shunt. This is different from the epilipti-form discharges that he noticed in the EEG she had back in August. Dr. Poplawski thinks this means Shelby is having subclinical seizures and is putting her back on Keppra (not real sure why we stopped in the first place).  After we get her dose up and she is on the medication for a month or so, we will do another EEG. As usual, we're not really sure what all this means, but we're thinking that the fact that these seizures are localized in the area of the shunt makes them not as bad as others. We go to the ophthalmologist on Wednesday, then I think we'll be finished with doctor appointments till next year!

The "Blizzard" of '09

We're snowed in here....it started yesterday morning and kept coming all day. We lost electricity, but are lucky to have wonderful next-door neighbors with a wood stove in their basement who put us up for the night. I think we got about 15 inches--the most that Trip and I have seen since we moved to Asheville and certainly the most snow that Harding has ever seen. It has been really fun to play outside in it with the kids and all of our neighbors. We built a huge snowman. Trip and I just watched people out walking pose for pictures with him. Harding said that he wanted it to come to life. Our power is back on now, the kids finally fell asleep, the house is slowly warming up and I'm about to start baking banana bread. Life is good.