Family Diversity

I love this photo. It's Ty with his cousin Blake. Every time they swim together I wish I had a camera. Finally someone did. Thanks Aunt Chrysta!

A recent project of mine for a new nephew. I need to do these more often. I could love this hobby.

These Days

A lot has happened since I blogged last. We were able to take a family vacation to California in June. We hit Universal Studios and Sea World. The kids had a lot of fun and even though we had a young baby with us, it was a blast.

In other news, we moved from Buckeye to Surprise a couple weeks ago. It was a short move and yet the longest lasting move out of the 9 moves we've made so far. I must have been at our new house 10 times to paint and bring boxes over before we actually moved in. The kids love the bunny rabbits that are all over our new neighborhood and every morning we have one hanging out in the backyard for them to chase away. We love our new area and feel blessed to have been able to sell our other house at all. Well it's not sold yet but we should have final approval in 2 days. This year has had many ups and downs but we've felt blessed through it all. The kids are doing well. Ty and Kaycie start school in less than a month now. Ty will be in first grade and Kaycie will be going to a special ed preschool for speech therapy. I'm hoping to take a sign language course at the local community college. I have a friend who started teaching classes in our old ward and I learned so much and then we moved. If Kaycie's hearing ever gets worse, it will be nice to know how to communicate still.

Tests, Tests & More Tests

After almost 8 months of constant ear infections, I finally got Kaycie a referral to see an ENT to see if tubes were necessary again. I also wanted to do a hearing test while we were there as I've suspected a little hearing loss in one ear from the constant infections she's had. I've suspected this for a few reasons, her speech has always been behind to me. The preschool screenings at the school district have confirmed this recently by telling me that she doesn't do so well on the articulation portions of the tests. Also, when she's sick, she can't hear me at all. It's like she's completely deaf. So at the ENT office, we first met with an audiologist. She tested Kaycie and then told me that sure enough she has high frequency hearing loss in both ears. I wasn't expecting that. She said that the type of loss she has is not caused by ear infections. Ear infections cause low frequency hearing loss. That explains why she's completely deaf when she's sick. So the ENT wants to do CT scans of her temporal bones and genetics tests to see what caused the loss. Her cousin Brenden also has high frequency hearing loss and was diagnosed when he was a newborn. His is more severe though. So now she will definitely qualify for speech therapy which she really needs before kindergarten starts next year. She also will need hearing aids to help amplify the sounds that she can't hear. They want to keep an eye on her for the next year or two to make sure it doesn't get worse. Our regular doctor also wants me to get blood tests done on her to make sure all the antibiotics she's been on in since November haven't had a negative effect on her body. Finally after all this, we still need to go back and see if she can get tubes to avoid all these ear infections. She had to miss our fun trip to Utah 2 weeks ago because of a painful ear infection. The poor girl can't catch a break!!

Love Story meets Viva La Vida