Emercency Room Excitement

I feel like I passed through a rite of passage as a parent Tuesday, February 23 with Andrew's first trip to the emergency room. I'll be perfectly happy if that's the last such trip we have to endure. So, here's the story:

After dinner Andrew was playing around while I cleaned up in the kitchen. As he often does, Andrew fell down and started crying, although this time he was crying extra hard. I looked over and saw that he had been playing with the tubular vacuum cleaner attachment, so I figured he had fallen on it. Paul picked him up and found that his mouth was bleeding. Then we realized that his mouth was bleeding A LOT. Paul rushed him over to the kitchen sink and tried to hold him so the blood drained out of his mouth so he didn't choke on it while I called 911. While I was on the phone, Paul realized that we should just drive Andrew to the hospital ourselves, so I hung up and we rushed to the car. I held Andrew on my lap in the car on the way to the hospital. Thankfully, the bleeding slowed significantly on the way to the hospital.

First we went to Magee Women's Hospital because it's the closest emergency room. (By the way, that's the hospital where Andrew was born). The emergency room there proved fairly useless, but they were able to look into his throat and see that he had a laceration on his soft palate. They decided to transfer Andrew to the children's hospital via ambulance just in case his small airway swelled shut on the way to there. Once at the children's hospital they gave Andrew an IV so they could do a CT scan of the artery behind the laceration to make sure that was not damaged. They decided that the artery looked fine, which was really good since they said it could cause a stroke if it got damaged--yikes! An ear, nose, throat doctor looked at his throat and determined that they wouldn't operate on it. They also gave Andrew some antibiotics through his IV. Then they needed to make sure that Andrew would drink before they let him go home, or else they'd have to keep him overnight for IV fluids. We were able to get him to drink some, and decided it was good enough and that it would probably be best to just get him home and to bed hoping that he would be more willing to drink the next day. All in all it was about a six and a half-hour ordeal so we didn't get home until about 1:30 am. Andrew ate only liquids for the first day after, and gradually worked his way up to solid foods.

His throat has healed really well so far and he's back to his normal self. I am thankful for all the blessings we received during this experience, bad as it was. For instance, Paul and I were both home when it happened, making it way easier to get Andrew in the car and to the hospital. They didn't have to operate on Andrew. The unnecessary ambulance ride between hospitals was just that- unnecessary- because Andrew was just fine during the transfer. Andrew, amazingly, fell asleep during the CT scan so he was able to stay still for it. The injury wasn't any worse than it was. I had decided at the last minute to get the medical insurance plan with the $1500 deductible instead of the $2500 deductible (whew).

Andrew's New Trick

Andrew understands human language! About a week ago he learned to point to his nose when you ask him where his nose is. He's also pretty good at mouth and he's in the process of learning ears and eyes, though he seems to have ears and eyes backwards for now. He'll sometimes even point to mommy's or daddy's nose or mouth. I think I've been casually showing him body parts for a while now, but he really seemed to start getting it once we started playing with his stuffed puppy learning toy that we got out of storage when we moved. Here's a little video of him in action:

Trip to Virginia

We've been super busy this week unpacking and settling in to our new place in Pittsburgh amidst the snow and ice, so it's been hard to find time to blog. Here is a little slideshow of Andrew's and my trip to Virginia to visit my grandpa, Papa Jim, with my mom and sister. We made this visit on our way to Pittsburgh.

Lily Przybyla

Last night I had the opportunity to see the newest addition to our extended family, Lily Przybyla. She was born at 5:13 am yesterday to Kryssy and Lerry. I tell you, I will never get tired of holding brand new babies. Each one is such a precious miracle, and each time I'm amazed at how little they are. Even though my Andrew was lighter than any other newborn I hold (he was only 5 lb 10 oz), I still can't believe how light they are! Here are some photos, and sorry about the red eyes, I can't get my Photoshop to work lately.

Andrew's Latest Tricks

As I've mentioned before, Andrew is all about putting things inside containers. He's also gotten really good lately at pointing to something he wants and grunting to indicate that he wants me to give it to him. The other day during breakfast he pointed at my orange juice glass on the table until I finally let him have a sip. Then he wanted to play with the glass and he finally put his sippy cup inside the glass. He then wanted to drink from the sippy cup while it was still inside the glass, which I helped him do a few times. He was quite proud of his innovation. This reminds me of this funny stuff Paul found online a number of months back, no doubt through the video game forum he participates in. If you want to check it out, go to http://yoyodawgdawg.com/about. Andrew's would be "Yo dawg, I heard you like to drink from cups, so I put a cup in yo cup so you can drink from a cup while you drink from a cup." You really have to check out the website to get it.




Another trick of Andrew's lately has been putting his hands up to either side of his face like the Home Alone face. He happened to do it first at my parents house during dinner with a bunch of people around to laugh at it and make a big deal about it, so it became an instant Andrew trick. Here he is doing it at Panda Express: