March 11

Hope you enjoyed watching the laughing video as much as we enjoyed making it.  We've got a handful of others that are too large to upload, but it's nice to see the wee boy laughing so much.  First, it was Scott who could solicit the most laughs, now Sadie takes the cake for best belly laughs. 
In other news, we've been given a date for the g-tube insertion.  April 8th.  But, in typical Ryan fashion, we've begun an appetite challenge in order to encourage oral feeding, and he's doing excellent. He's taking more than half his feeds orally now.  Not sure how long he'll last, because we've been down this road before - but, we're encouraged because he's doing well all around.  His oxygen is down, his reflux is better managed, and he's actually interested in eating.  Our feeding specialist didn't want to get excited because we're still in early days of this challenge, but if he continues to do well, there's a possibility of postponing the surgery, pulling his NG tube and seeing how he does.  I will NOT get my hopes up.  I've come to terms with the fact that he is getting the surgical tube - the NG tube has been hell on earth to deal with, and we've waited what seems like an eternity for this darn surgery date.  OBVIOUSLY no one will let him have unnecessary surgery, and if he doesn't need it, we'll definitely do a happy dance, but until the actual day, we'll keep our fingers crossed.  We also need to start weaning his oxygen again, and doing too many things at once never goes well.  If he continues to do so well with the oxygen, we could be looking at him being off during daytime hours by June (I believe I've said that before.  Oh well, good news like that is allowed to be repeated). In other news - physically he's doing ok, but we'd like to see some more action in the rolling, and sitting departments.  He's getting stronger every day, but he'll be 7 months corrected on Wednesday and the 'experts' are expecting certain things to happen.  Ryan will do it when he's good and ready, as he's shown us with everything else.  I've started a project for his 1st birthday - hopefully I'll b able to finish it in time.  It's bringing up some painful memories, but also it's providing some good perspective as to how far he has come.