7 Months Old!

Today Waverly is 7 months old!  Our little girl is growing and growing (Can you tell by the pictures?!?)!!!  Now that we're past Thanksgiving, we've been pulling out some holiday outfits.  So cute!

 One big accomplishment this month was feeding her by mouth!  She's not getting little tastes of food on the spoon, and loving it!  So far she's had bananas, sweet potato, ice cream, icing (at her 1/2 birthday party), and chocolate creme brulee (on Thanksgiving).  As you can tell, we've added a few fun things in there!  

 Waverly got to have her first Thanksgiving this past month.

 She also enjoyed another date with her man Ryan.  (Ryan is 4 years old and has Miller-Dieker Syndrome like Waverly.)

 We had fun at the UVA vs. Virginia Tech game the Saturday after Thanksgiving (although UVA played a horrible game!).  The weather was actually pretty warm, so we decided to go and had just planned on me leaving with her once the sun went down and it got too cool for her to be outside.  However, we had a surprise!  We were so blessed to be able to spend the second half of the game in a suite with my cousin Diana (who's sweet husband switched tickets with us so that we could be there out of the cold).  The rest of the family was jealous that we were able to go up to a suite, since they've been attending games since the 1980's and had never gotten to be in a suite yet!  I guess you get special privileges when you're special! 

 A cute Wahoo!

 Our BIG news of this month is that our girl is BACK!  Her smile and talking have returned.  She came back to us the week of Thanksgiving...what a gift!  We love seeing her precious smiles after missing them for a month.  We hope the seizures will leave her alone and let her "stay" with us now. 

She is very interactive again with people, and loves for people to talk to her and just be near her.  She's also pretty content laying on her playmat, in the swing, or in her carseat as well.  She's really a pretty easy baby in that she's not too fussy.  She still loves to be cuddled and held, but will let you know when she's had enough and just wants to lay by herself.  She's been growing, and is now 14.5 pounds!  Today is also the last dose of her steroids, so we may see the puffiness start to go down some.  She's still at about the 5th percentile on all the growth charts, but her weight for height is at about the 90th percentile!  Chunker!  She wears mostly 3-6 month clothes, although is still in some 0-3 month pants (she's got a tiny waist, and pants tend to fall off of her!), and can wear some 6-9 month shirts.  Her arms seem to be kind of short too, so we often have to roll up the sleeves on her shirts and sleepers.  As far as sleeping, she still has an awake period in the middle of the night, sometime between 2 and 6.  Sometimes it takes her a while to settle back down to sleep.  If it's any time before 5a.m., I usually give her melatonin to help her settle back down (otherwise, she can be awake for several hours).  She also seems to like it when I put music on my ipod for her and lay it beside her head.  Alison Krauss is her favorite.   :)  She's had a cough for several weeks now, but we've continued to monitor her closely, and other than that, she's had no symptoms, so we think it's just her clearing her throat from mucous or something.  I think I've started to notice some "pretend" coughing too to get attention.  Smart girl!  We have noticed her wrists turning in more lately, so we are in the process of ordering her splints for her hands, wrists, and arms to help with that.  We are so grateful for our sweet girl, and for how well she's been doing.  As we enter the winter and cold months, please continue to pray for her health, that her body would be strong against all the germs out there.