Late October update

I help out with the flowers at church once every 6 weeks or so (I'm pretty sure I'm the youngest flower lady by, oh, at least 20 years), and this past Saturday it was my turn to do the arrangements. I took Maggie with me and several times I mentioned something about the sanctuary ("Maggie, let's just do the flowers in the sanctuary"). About halfway through Maggie and I had to walk from the Abbey House down the hall back to the sanctuary and Maggie said, "Mama? Can I stop off at the potty on the way to the February?"

Here's Maggie in her cool bat 3-D glasses sent to her by Uncle Steve & Uncle James. She likes to wear them around the house and loves that everything is red with one eye and blue with the other eye.
We've been riding bikes a lot lately. It's simultaneously one of the most fun and most irritating things we do. Once she gets going and gets comfortable on the bike it's great and so much fun, but it takes her a good 5-15 minutes to even want to peddle. She prefers to go uphill because it's faster going downhill (boy does she have a lot to learn!), and her best riding partner is her friend Caleb because she always wants to be first so she'll go speedily enough to keep up with him. When she's scared she says, "Get me Get me Get me!" over and over again. I'm embarrassed to admit it drives me batty! I love riding my bike and I just want her to have fun and it's so hard to be patient and allow her to enjoy it on her own time frame. Patience, patience...a state I have been striving for, oh, forever.

We've all had some kind of cough/sniffle/24-hour fever viral cold the past two weeks and Maggie turned that into her first ever ear infection. It was pretty mild and we didn't even have to treat with antibiotics but I'm so glad she's gone 4 years without getting one.

Finn is also doing great. He had an appointment with his geneticist, Dr. Summar, last Tuesday and it was wonderful, as usual. They even let us skip the blood draws this time because he's been so stable. We talked to Dr. Summar about his moving to Washington DC and mentioned that our only saving grace is that we'll get to see Dr. Lanpher (our second favorite dr) and he said, "Ummm...about Dr. Lanpher. I'm actually recruiting him to come to DC, too." Of course he assured us that the next guy down the totem pole is great and a genius, but we're pretty bummed. Honestly, Finn is doing so well now that we're not worried about it at all but Dr. Summar and Dr. Lanpher feel like a major security blanket for us and we have so much trust in them. Then I said we were glad our favorite nurse practitioner, Natalie, wasn't going to be moving and they sort of looked at each other in a weird way. Apparently he's working on recruiting her, too. I guess Vanderbilt needs to get their act together! Dr. Summar did say that once Finn is 2 or 3 he'll get down to 1-2 appointments a year and that theoretically we could just come to see him in DC for those. That actually sounds like a great idea to me, and even do-able. Dr. Summar also took some photos of Finn and asked if he could use them in a talk sometime (I think I've mentioned it but apparently he travels the world lecturing/teaching about organic acid disorders - sounds pretty thrilling, doesn't it?!). Let's just say it's a mutual admiration society at all of Finn's appointments (pulling me out of the equation - we all love them and they all love Finn!). Anyway, blah blah blah, medical stuff...

Here he is sucking on his bottom lip. I don't know why but this is one of my favorite faces he makes.
In more fun news Finn is doing great with solids and is up to rice cereal, apples, several types of squash, sweet potatoes, and I'm making pears for him this week. His weight was actually only a few ounces higher than it was 5 weeks ago which is a big change from his first 6 months when he was gaining at least a pound a month! Now he's about 39 percentile for height and about 44 percentile for weight. Not such a big guy any more (but he looks just right to me). He also sits really well by himself and is starting to balance himself on his hands and knees with his tummy off of the ground.

Ahhh! So smiley! What a lovebug.