Doctors, promotions and restaurants

Meagan had her annual cleft review today. When she was younger, it was more frequent, but now she goes to the cleft clinic once a year. Each time she sees a range of doctors: a pediatrician, a plastic surgeon, a maxilofacial surgeon, an orthodontist, a speech therapist, an audiologist and a dietician. She gets her vitals taken, and then we sit in a room, and the doctors come around to us. The whole process takes two-three hours, but it's a lot more efficient than it would be if we had to go to each doctor's office separately. She experienced the blood pressure cuff for the first time today, which she wasn't really thrilled with, but then she cooperated really well on getting her height and weight. She's 27 pounds and exactly 36 inches high. She also cooperated well with the other doctors today. In the past, she's been unwilling to open her mouth for them to look in, but today she was really good about it. Most of the doctors were pleased with her status. The pediatrician asked if she's potty trained, and she's not, but it's my fault because I just haven't wanted to deal with it, but since she's not, the doctor said I should wait a few months because of the baby. Let things settle down, and then give it a try. Her weight's gone up from the 5% to the 25%, so that's good, too. Her favorite part of the day was the hearing test. She had little wires in her ears, and every time she heard a sound, she put a block in a bucket. She thought it was a great game, and then they gave her some stickers at the end. The plastic surgeon is now thinking that she only needs one more surgery instead of two. She needs a bone graft to fill the gap in her front gumline, and she was going to have a lip correction to make her lip a little smoother. That was going to be done at two different times, but now it may be done together. I say "may", because we won't be in this location anymore when it comes time, and a different surgeon may have a different opinion. We'll just see. She is going to start up speech therapy again, though. By the time she turned two, she maybe said one or two words, but mostly walked around the house saying, "Ooooh, oooh." It was kind of irritating. So she had therapy for a few months that really got her talking, until she refused to cooperate anymore. Now she speaks in sentences, and has a good vocabulary, but she also has some pronunciation quirks. She often puts a "k" sound in the middle of words like "glasskes" instead of "glasses", and she tends to drop the first sound of a lot of words, especially f, s, th, and sh. The other day, she was trying to tell me there was a fly on the window, but it came out "why" instead of "fly". I got her to make an "f" sound, but she couldn't put it together with the rest of the word. It came out "fff--why". The speech therapist had a name for what she's doing, and said it's really common to cleft kids, and can be trained out of them fairly easily, so we're going to give therapy another try. I hope she cooperates and doesn't get all stubborn again. At the end of the whole thing, she got to pick out a toy to take home, which she hasn't done before, but she picked a green beanie baby bear, and loved it and hugged it the whole way home. It was kind of cute.



Bethany spent the morning with her cousins Evelyn and Brie, and played with their dog Ares. She was ready for me to get her, though, because when I came to the door to pick her up, she was waiting right there for me. It's nice to have her so exicted to see me again, even if it's only been a few hours.



Tonight we went out to dinner to celebrate. Nate found out on Monday that he made major. He's not going to actually pin on for quite some time. His line number is 2080, and only 175 people get to pin on each month. Apparently, they haven't even finished promoting everyone from last year's board, so Nate figures he'll pin on sometime around next July. That is a long time, but at least we know he's guaranteed, and he doesn't have to go through the selection board again. The pay raise will come right about when we expect to be moving, which will kind of be good on the budget, since we'll only have to shake things up once.



Anyway, we decided to go somewhere new and fun, so we went to the Cheesecake Factory. It was pretty good, except for the kid's food. Both of them wanted macaroni and cheese, but when it came, it didn't look like macaroni and cheese. Bethany's response was, "That's not macaroni and cheese, that's pasta!" and refused to even touch it. Meagan wouldn't touch hers, either. I'm not sure what kind of pasta they used, but it wasn't even macaroni. We tried to share some our food with them, because they'd both been complaining that they were hungry on the way, but they didn't really want ours, either. When the waitress came by, I told her that kids refused to eat their food, because it wasn't macaroni, and she let us order something new for them and took the other off the bill, which I thought was really nice. So they got little hamburgers and strange looking chicken fingers (we mixed up two plates so they both had some of each) and fries. Bethany dove into the chicken, and Meagan only ate fries, but at least they had something to eat. Of course, though, as soon as we got in the car, Meagan said she wanted her hamburger, so I got her doggie bag/box out and she ate her hamburgers (just the patty) on the way home. She eats like a bird--a little bit at a time, but kind of frequently. Oh well, as long as she's getting the nutrition she needs.