Tag Archives: kids

Oli is just a little quirky.

3 Feb

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“Sometimes you just need to look at life from a different perspective.” -Unknown

As the first few days of Oli’s life turned into the first few weeks, results began to trickle in from Oliana’s many tests. And I do mean trickle. Sometimes it seemed to take forever to hear anything back. I guess I can sum up what most of those tests found by saying, they were pretty normal, except… not completely.

My sweet Oli is just kind of quirky.

The cardiologist said that her echo was normal except for a few things. Oli’s first quirk. The right ventricle in her heart was a little larger than normal and there was a small hole in her heart that should have closed when she was born, except that it didn’t. It was very minor.

She had a repeat pelvic ultrasound to check her kidneys. They still had extra fluid in them and then the doctor threw in a bonus quirk. She had 2 uterus’s.

What? I’d never heard of that either.

I was starting to think that I should have paid more attention in nursing school.

Of course, as soon as I got home I Googled “two uteruses”.

Have I mentioned how much I love Google?

Apparently this is not all that uncommon.

Google told me that the there were two draw backs.

Sometimes when a woman with two uterus’s gets pregnant the baby can be born preterm because the uterus’s do not stretch to the size of one normal uterus. The baby runs out of room.

The second draw back was that it is possible for a woman to get pregnant at two different times and have pseudo twins. A baby in each uterus.

Well, Google. I’d say those are pretty big drawbacks!!!

A trip to the endocrinologist revealed that her pituitary labs were normal, except her pituitary gland did not look normal on the MRI. He said that her posterior pituitary gland was ectopic. Which just means that it wasn’t in the spot that it was supposed to be. Oli has had a few more MRI’s since then and I have heard many different opinions about how her pituitary looks.

Is it moving? Changing? Mutating? I have no idea.

I don’t think anyone really has a definitive answer as to what is wrong with the appearance of that gland.

I told you she was quirky.

The rest of the MRI results were normal except….(Yep. You guessed it) for a few things.

Apparently she did not have an optic chiasm or a pineal gland.

Are those important?

Here is what Google tells me about these VERY important pieces of her body.

1543,Visalius'OpticChiasma (2)
The optic chiasm or optic chiasma (Greek χίασμα, “crossing”, from the Greek χιάζω ‘to mark with an X’, after the Greek letter ‘Χ’, chi) is the part of the brain where the optic nerves (CN II) partially cross. The optic chiasm is located at the bottom of the brain immediately below the hypothalamus.

The images on the nasal sides of each retina cross over to the opposite side of the brain via the optic nerve at the optic chiasm. The temporal images, on the other hand, stay on the same side. This allows the images from either side of the field from both eyes to be transmitted to the appropriate side of the brain, combining the sides together. This allows for parts of both eyes that attend to the right visual field to be processed in the left visual system in the brain, and vice versa. This is linked to skin sensation which also reaches the opposite side of the body, after reaching the diencephalon (rear forebrain). This decussation (crossing) is an adaptive feature of frontally oriented eyes and therefore having binocular vision. (Some animals, with laterally positioned eyes, have little binocular vision, so there is a more complete crossover of visual signals.)

Beyond the optic chiasm, with crossed and uncrossed fibers, the optic nerves become optic tracts. The signals are passed on to the lateral geniculate body, in turn giving them to the occipital cortex (the outer matter of the rear brain).[2]

250px-Illu_pituitary_pineal_glandsThe pineal gland (also called the pineal body, epiphysis cerebri, epiphysis, conarium or the “third eye”) is a small endocrine gland in the vertebrate brain. It produces the serotonin derivative melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns and seasonal functions.[1][2] Its shape resembles a tiny pine cone (hence its name), and it is located near the centre of the brain, between the two hemispheres, tucked in a groove where the two rounded thalamic bodies join.

The MRI also showed that her optic nerves are so extremely small that they can hardly be visualized. In a few years, they weren’t visualized at all.

And that folks is one reason why my girl does not see and a BIG reason why she does not sleep!

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You’re probably not a special needs parent if….

2 Feb

1. You have money.

2. You drive a small car.

3. You drive a nice car.

4. You don’t know what IEP stands for.

5. You don’t have a small panic attack, cringe, or cry when you hear the word IEP.

6. You go out to eat at restaurants and stay longer than 20 minutes.

7. Going out to eat does not mean going through the drive through at McDonalds.

8. You regularly enjoy meals without someone spitting a mouthful of chewed mush all over your shirt and then clapping and laughing. This is not done by your baby.

9. Your purse doesn’t weigh 5,000lbs and include things like emergency medication syringes, extra-large diapers, special snacks, multiple packs of boogie wipes, or weird toys.

10. Your wallet isn’t bursting with business cards from doctors, specialists, therapy places, schools, and support groups.

11. You never get emails titled “Sale! Feeding chair only 1 million dollars (regularly priced at 5 million)”

12. You don’t schedule your day based on what kind of mood your child is in.

13. You can go shopping with your children and never end up back in the car crying.

14. You’ve probably never been bitten, scratched, spit on pooped on, peed on, or thrown up on all in one day. Unless you’re a nurse.

15. Poop on the walls is DEFINITLY an emergency.

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25 Reasons You Know You’re A Special Needs Parent

31 Jan

I recently read a post on the Scary Mommy blog entitled 25 reasons why you know you’re a parent.

I would to like to add a list of 25 reasons you know you’re a special needs parent:

1.You invite random strangers (new therapists) into your house and before they get there, tell your children to quickly throw their crap around the room so it doesn’t appear “too clean” because you don’t want the therapists to expect a clean house every time they visit.

2.Meeting a great therapist is like a 12 year old girl meeting a celebrity. There are tears, lots of hugs and phrases spoken like “you’re so cool”. You also make sure you to tell them multiple times throughout a session how amazing they are and you are thrilled to have finally met one.

3.Racing through the grocery store, hollering please stop biting my face, pushing a big stroller and a little cart, shoving gluten free snacks in your child’s hands, while you watch them slowly go from quiet whining to total combustion, still managing to remember to grab deodorant (since you’ve been out for two days and have been using your husbands), and NOT cry when the checkout lady insists on talking to you about her grandson and how well behaved he is.

4.Sitting in a doctor’s office for 3 hours at least a few times a month doesn’t seem abnormal at all and now you just remember to pack every single portable electronic device in your house, a picnic basket full of snacks and also a full meal because you never know when 3 hours may turn into 5 or 6.

5.When you have to wait anywhere else with your other kids they are always the best behaved.

6.The sentence “Her eye is crooked again” is not spoken by the sci-fi character in the TV.

7.The sentence “Her eye fell out” is not from the horror movie.

8.A diaper bag is required for at least 5 years. It’s probably the same bag purchased when your child was born.

9.The medicine cabinet in your house full of syringes, liquids, and pills does not belong to a drug addict or your 90 year old grandmother.

10.You have strange swinging contraptions hanging from the ceiling and huge jungle gym equipment in your living room.

11.You go to the gym not to get fit, but simply to get out of the house. Then spend the entire time you are there checking your Facebook and bursting into fits of crazed laughter because you have “escaped”.

12.You believe that all baby items should come super-sized so you don’t have to spend a gazillion dollars on special order items that are the same ones they sell at Walmart only bigger.

13.Driving an hour and a half for a 25 minute appointment does not seem like a waste of time.

14.An hour and a half drive is actually like a mini vacation.

15.You start to actually love driving because when your kids are crying you can say “Sorry can’t get to you. Mommy’s driving” and not feel bad.

16.You celebrate pooping on the potty and reward it with high fives, good jobs, kisses, and candy. (Oh wait. That was also my 2 year old)

17.You don’t even bat an eye anymore when you check out at the pharmacy and the bill is $400. You just smile sweetly at the cashier and say “Of course. Do you accept credit?”

18.The wrong look from a stranger in the direction of your child causes you to snort, snarl, and foam at the mouth. You have the world’s best stink eye.

19.Sometimes punching people in the face just makes sense to you.

20.If someone overheard your conversation with your husband while on a dinner date they would think you were from the CIA and speaking in code. blah blah… IEP. . . blah blah. . .ARD. . .blah blah… MMHR. . .blah blah. . . DARS. . .

21.LOL! That last one was a joke. You don’t go to restaurants!! And you definitely don’t go there with your husband!

22.Dates include wearing your best flannel pajamas, renting a movie on TV and falling asleep during the opening credits.

23.Poop on the walls is not an emergency.

24.You are somewhat proud of the title “that mom”.

25.You absolutely hate it when people ask you “what is your child’s diagnosis?” and are thinking of just handing out laminated business cards because it would just be so much easier than explaining it. And you forget how to spell the damn word half the time so having it written down would be nice. Plus they’d be handy in those time when someone has the nerve to look at your child wrong. While snarling, spitting and growling you could also hand them a business card.

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10 Things my mother forgot to tell me about being a mom

30 Jan

1. I will never eat a hot meal again.

2. Strike that. I will never eat a meal again. I will be forced to eat random snacks I find at the bottom of my purse or in the car because I will continually be too busy and forget to eat.

3. I will be expected to be available at all times during my child’s shower to adjust the temperature with the faucet because it is always too hot or too cold and can change multiple times during a 10 minute shower. (Seriously when do they learn to adjust the temperature themselves?)

4. The main sentences in my house will be the following:

• Stop picking your nose.
• Don’t stick your toy in that.
• You need to poop INSIDE the potty.
• No you can’t build a rocket ship out of crap in the random crap drawer.
• Stop picking your nose. (I say that one a lot)
• Eat your dinner.
• Sit down and eat your dinner.
• Stop crying and eat your dinner.
• No I did not make that to torture you.

6. If I get rid of the one toy that they haven’t play with in 2 years that is the one toy they will ask me about the day after I get rid of it. And then I will have to go to the store and spend $50 replacing it because I crumble like gluten-free bread under my children’s guilt trips.

7. Bedtime is actually hours after I put them in bed.

8. “Go to bed and stay there” means absolutely nothing in my children’s language. I may as well be speaking Chinese after they hear the words “It’s bedtime”

9. There are such days as Pee on the floor day. Where everyone in my house somehow manages to pee on the floor. Including the cat.

10. I will never pee or shower alone again. Someone will always barge in, bring their drama, expect me to referee from the shower stall, find a toy behind the toilet, need juice, a snack, fall down, cry, have to pee, or have a poop emergency while I am using the bathroom. Including the cat.

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