Isaiah 7.17 : Updates, etc.

My parents are coming in from Racine, WI today to celebrate the New Year and see Isaiah before the holidays are completely over. I found a great Polish sausage place about a half hour from our house and picked up some fresh (unsmoked) Polish Kielbasa and Cherry filled Pierogi (polish dumplings) which has been my family's traditional Christmas breakfast for as long as I can remember. Since my parents weren't here for Christmas we're going to do it for New Years Day breakfast! Anyways I've got to run and pick them up from the airport.

Wow, Isaiah made off with a pretty good haul on Christmas and I got to take on the task of putting everything together. You'd think that infant and toddler things wouldn't have too many small pieces, but there are a good number of things to do yet. Our living room floor is covered even more now in toys so Rachel and I are going to take him to his first trip to IKEA to see if there's some sort of good storage bench we can get to put all his toys in the living room into. My ultimate goal in the next 6 months or so is to partially finish off a portion of the basement and make that a playroom for him and an eventual media theater for us as he grows up. That way we can get a bunch of the toys out of the everyday path of things and have a good place for him to spread out. Our basement has relatively low ceilings at +/- 7 feet when most ceilings are at a minimum of 8' in a typical house so I'm trying to think up a creative way to make it all work without feeling supe

Well tonight Rachel and I cooked a good dinner for ourselves. In my family we traditionally celebrated with the extended family on Christmas Eve at my Grandma's. We'd always have a nice dinner (prime rib I think) and open presents afterwards. I usually barely ate anything since I was always so excited to open presents. We'd then have our personal family Christmas at home. Here we're kind of flipping things somewhat. Its just me, Rachel and Izzy. I made some nice bacon wrapped tenderloin steaks and Rachel made some awesome mashed potatoes, green beans and pudding. What we weren't expecting was Isaiah's little 'dessert' for us which was a nice big poop! I swear this kid has the best timing. He might be the next Robin Williams or something. Our plan was to give him a little bottle and open up some presents here tonight before heading over to Rachel's parents tomorrow, unfortunately with the bottle came a nice big drowsy baby. Rachel and I are

So we tried taking Isaiah to church again today. This time we went to Northpoint with Rachel's parents and brother. We swear every time we try to go to church this little guy does something to throw a little bit of a monkey wrench into things. This morning was no exception. Essentially right after Rachel gave him a bath he decided it was a good time to poop up his back. Running thin on time I had the bright idea of rinsing him off in the kitchen sink with the sprayer, rather than setting up an entire new bath for him. So here I am holding a naked baby over the kitchen sink while Rachel sprays the poop off of him and cleans him up. He, of course, hates the sprayer and decides to add a little spray of his own and pees all over me. (Luckily I wasn't dressed for church yet) We did manage to get him dressed and clean ourselves up and get on our way to church. That was the first half of today. The second half was while we were at church. Northpoint, if you don't know,

Well good news and bad news regarding Isaiah's hands. We could possibly be having his first surgery as soon as 12/24, bad news is our specialist will no longer be with our insurance after the new year which poses a pretty big issue since our insurance currently has a 70/30 $20,000 deductible for our of network providers and that only covers the 'usual and customary' rate so anything Coventry deems above the UCR is our responsibility 100%. We're trying to see if Coventry will allow our speicialist to be considered in network for him due to the fact there aren't any other doctors locally that can handle this type of surgery, but that could take a few weeks. We do have a possibility of getting into the Shriner's Hospital in Philadelphia (their hand center) and the doctor that would be doing the surgery is the one that trained our specialist here so we know he is a good doctor. We're still early on and ultimately trying to keep it local if possible, but we

Happy Saint Nicholas Day! My family's tradition when I was growing up was to celebrate St Nick's day by putting out our shoes the night before and waking up to an ornament and candy filled shoes if we've been good. It's a German tradition that not everybody celebrates, but its a fun little thing my family did that I'd like to keep doing. Rachel and I have done this for each other the last few years and this year we got little Izzy involved too! We have a little video of this morning for your enjoyment.