Huge Update!!

I know I've been slacking off in the blogging department. We haven't had anything super exciting going on over the last several months and I've been working a lot of extra shifts and overtime trying to compensate for all the weeks David has been jobless. Since May he has switched jobs twice, but we're finally with a company that's large enough to keep him working for quite some time. In June he found a job with a company he really liked, but it was so small they had a hard time keeping him busy. Then in September he started with a new company that is not only larger and has more jobs, but will pay him more and he'll received some benefits. He will also gain some new experience doing utility work (think of all that road construction you hate so much....yeah David's one of those workers now so DRIVE CAREFULLY!!) :) He's enjoying the new work he's doing and has even been working some overtime, which has been nice for our bank account.

Zach has had several neprology appointments over the last several months and they haven't been terribly happy with his progress. A couple months ago we switched his liquid potassium to a capsule and within a couple months his potassium levels plummeted from 3.4 to 2.4. With this level drop we went from getting him to eat 4-5 jars of baby food a day, to once again refusing to eat anything solid. We switched him back to liquid potassium and within 5 days his levels were back up to 3.5. We still are struggling to get him to eat any baby food, but every several days he will cooperate with us and eat a jar. He still won't swallow anything with texture, but he continues to put anything and everything in his mouth long enough to chew it and then subsequently spit it out. We're still not sure why he does this, but we'll keep working with him and speech therapy until we figure it out.

At his latest appointment, we found that over the last year he has only gained 1 pound and hasn't gained any weight over the last 6 months. He's also starting to stall out on his height. They're really concerned about his growth and brain development if he's not getting enough calories, and he's to the point where he's even refusing to drink very much milk (we're down to only 12-16 oz a day with a lot of juice and gatorade). We started him on polycose again that we're putting in EVERYTHING, and trying to push him to drink more milk. His nephrologist and dietician are giving us 8 more weeks to try to make Zach gain weight. If he continues to not take in enough calories, we'll meet with a surgeon and plan on surgery sometime in the beginning of January to place a gastric tube. This will allow him to eat as he normally would during the day, and then we would supplement him with several hundred calories at night while he's sleeping. It will also allow us to give him his medications with any hassle. Even though we're doing all we can to avoid the g-tube by increasing the calories in all his drinks, we're mentally preparing ourselves for this surgery. We wish we could explain to Zach that if he would eat baby food and drink more milk we could avoid surgery, but it's not something he understands at this point. As upsetting as this surgery will be for all of us, I think we'll all have a huge weight lifted off our shoulders and Zach will be able to start gaining weight like a champ and get back to a normal sized little boy.

That's basically all the updating we have as not much has been going on over the last several months. At this point we're preparing for the holidays and getting ready for our handsome little man to turn 2 years old!! (even though he's already acting like he's 3). He still doesn't talk a lot, but we're also working with speech therapy on this and just like every other developmental milestone we're sure one day out of the blue he'll start speaking in full sentences. Until then he is generally able to communicate but it includes a lot of whining, crying, pointing, and sign language (he knows "more", "please", and "shoes"). I'll try to keep everything more updated and will post some 2 year old pictures here in the next several weeks, followed shortly by Christmas pics!