Isaiah 7.17 : Updates, etc.

Thank goodness we decorated Isaiah's room with a Noah's Ark theme because with all the rain we're having here in Atlanta, the house just might float away... Well its not that bad yet, but we have had about a half an inch of water in much of the basement. Either the house has settled over the years, or the floor is just that out of whack, because only half of the basement is wet right now. Of course its the half that includes our little 'dungeon room' that is carpeted which means I will be having fun in the next week removing who knows how old wet carpet in order to prevent mold from over taking the house. The HEPA filter in Isaiah's room will be running extra this week that's for sure. Most schools are closed around the metro tomorrow, which makes this rain almost like a snow day back up north, but much wetter and warmer. Work shut down early today because of the rain, and I don't know if we'll be open tomorrow since the owner lives about a ...

Isaiah has seemingly bounced back from the flu fairly quickly which leads us to wonder if he really had it at all. We know he was sick, but everything we've read said he'd have a fever for 3-5 days, and he's gone the last two days sans fever. He's almost back up to his normal appetite, but he's still sleeping a ton. Unfortunately it seems like Rachel is getting whatever he had now from taking care of him this week and she's off trying to rest as I take care of the little guy today. Hopefully we can all nip this in the bud sooner than later because we miss hanging out with our neighbors and being able to go out and about. It's been raining here pretty much all week, and making us all a bit stir crazy.

I just realized this morning I haven't posted any new photo albums in awhile. I knew I had to get the Disney trip pictures up, but I had to get some of his surgery pics up as well form our last trip to Dallas. Just click the pictures below to go to the new galleries! Dallas trip pictures, including a visit with a new friend, Aiden, who also has Apert Syndrome and was born 2 weeks after me! These are the infill pictures from after my surgery up to the present and include the trip to Chattanooga and Ruby Falls, Disney World over Labor Day, and my first haircut!

We thought we got through Disney this time unscathed. He wasn't throwing up the entire time home, and even though it was even hotter than last time, he didn't act like he was getting heat exhaustion because we were careful to keep going into the A/C. Well the last couple days he's been fairly crabby and yesterday he woke up with a fever of 102.1. We gave him some Tylenol and it helped for a while, by noon he was back up to nearly 103 and Rachel took him to the doctor. Turns out he has the Swine Flue. Wooohoo! I guess its better to get it now than a couple weeks before his next surgery in November, but still not fun in the least. It also means we're all on a virtual quarantine for a while. I'm essentially only going to work and the store when needed, and Rachel is planning to stay in with Isaiah. He was pretty miserable last night and got up numerous times. He's going to have a fever for the next 3-5 days and we're trying to manage it with some Infa...

Isaiah zonked out on the floor

I hate having to write a post like this, but there's been a bit of a question from a number of people of where we got the money for the Disney trip we took last weekend. I can can assure everyone that all the money you donate to Isaiah's fund through Apert International always goes 100% to his medical needs (surgery deposits, travel costs to Dallas, prescriptions, etc.) and his daily necessities (diapers, food, clothing). The money we spent as a family came out of our reserves we had been building for the past year or so. Ever since we knew that Isaiah was going to have some unknown issues before he was born we thought there would be a good chance that Rachel would need to stay home from work to take care of him we started to cut back on extraneous expenses and save money. When the economy was starting to turn south and my work started laying off people last October we started pinching even more with the supreme possibility of me not having a job in the near future so that ...

So today will be Isaiah's first official haircut, if you don't count the little bit we needed to snip to get his IV off at his last surgery. (we kept that little bit anyways) This is our first official trip to a haircut place which I guess specializes in kids and is called something cute like 'pigtails and crew cuts.' Hopefully they're creative enough to do something with his long bangs and Ben Franklin/Grandpa Munster like wisps of hair at his ears. You probably don't seen a ton of shots of the back of his head, but as it gets longer, its getting pretty curly. We may let that grow out a bit, but we'll see. Anyways I plan to take the camcorder and if they let me, take a bit of video. If I can get it to work right I'll try to post some here.

So since we have annual passes it really opened us up to taking our time and helped us not feel like we had to cram everything into 2 days worth of tickets. We got a little bit of extra time Friday night when we came in to Orlando, and Monday, after we checked out of the hotel, we went to Disney's Hollywood Studios for a few hours. We started off with the Indiana Jones stunt show and we realized that Isaiah has seen way too many action movies for his young age because the majority of the bullet sounds and explosions didn't phase him in the least. I think I figured out he can handle the loud bangs when he sees what goes with them. The delay from the fireworks confuses and scares him since its not as readily apparent where the sound is coming from to him. Hollywood studios doesn't have a ton of rides, and most of them aren't kid friendly so we mostly walked around, went through the Star Tours gift shop and a Narnia exhibit, before we went to the big hit of the trip...

Sunday Isaiah decided to wake us all up at a bit past 7am. We tried to get him back to bed so we could rest a bit, but to no avail so we decided to get a jump on the park. We decided we were just going to take it slow today after yesterday's meltdown at the end of the day, and we just didn't want to kill ourselves. It's a vacation after all and we know we're coming back in March with my Mom. We got into the Magic Kingdom just before 11am and were promptly greeted by the street party parade which Isaiah seemed to enjoy. We followed it up Main Street and watched it for a little while before heading to Peter Pan to get Fast Passes. We were about the wait in line there after what happened last time. Isaiah, of course, decides this is a good time to sleep, so we window shopped for a bit and headed over to the Winnie the Pooh ride. He wasn't pukey this time like he was back in March and really enjoyed the ride, especially the bouncy part with Tigger. At the ...

So Saturday after a dip in the hotel pool we headed over to the Magic Kingdom mostly to take Isaiah to the Spectromagic parade. We had a little time before the parade started at 9pm so we got the token ride of It's a Small World out of the way. You could tell certain parts of the ride were already being decorated for Christmas. There were some reindeer peeking over the hills at the beginning of the ride and the former hot air balloons at the ceiling looked amazingly like christmas ornaments. Another area had snowmen in the sky. Most of the changes were the aerial things, and not that noticeable unless you're an anal retentive architect type person like me who is trying to drown out the song in your head. I apparently fell asleep on the ride at the end since we were stuck for a couple minutes in the last room due to slow loading/unloading. We started making our way back up to the front of the park to find a spot for the parade. Its a pretty cool parade with all sorts of l...

This is about midway through the show. He had an absolute blast. This was the last attraction we went to on Monday before heading back home. He was giggling and bopping through pretty much the entire show!

Yes that is Rachel under there, but apparently she's a peaceful bounty hunter lurking in the shop after the Star Tours ride at Hollywood Studios

Here's Mom and Isaiah patiently waiting to see Mickey Mouse, Handy Manny, Little Einsteins, and Pooh and Friends live! Just the music and lights while waiting for the show to begin made him smile really big!

Here's Isaiah having a blast with Mom in Mickey Mouse's Living Room!

Test picture So we just figured out how to post camera phone pics up to the blog while we're out and about so we'll try to pop a few up of the rest of our adventures. The posts will be pretty simple like above until we get access to internet at the hotel or home, but it should mean more pictures!

So we made it. Our 'resort' hotel room is alright but nowhere near the look of the pictures, but hey we spent next to nothing on it so we can't really complain. We're right by Downtown disney and 5 mins from EPCOT. Since we have annual passes we checked in last night and went to the EPCOT for a couple of hours. We went on The Seas with Nemo, ate dinner in Morocco, and had a pretzel in Germany before attempting to watch the illuminations fireworks at 9. You could tell he liked looking at the fireworks but absolutely hated hearing the bangs. He had a bit of a meltdown just before the finale so we started for the exit just a little bit before it was all over, but we didn't miss much. We're noticing he's not liking the rides as much this time around. He's cried on pretty much everything he's ridden on except for Spaceship earth which he slept through for the most part. We did lift him up for the picture on the ride which they use for a little vid...

Okay, so Rachel and I have officially gone off the deep end. This afternoon decided we were going to Disney World this weekend since Rachel got a bee in her bonnet after seeing ludicrously low hotel prices online (like $50/night for a resort!) That's not the only crazy thing we did, we bought annual passes to Disney. AAA had them on sale and since we know we're going back in March as a planned family vacation, it was just cheaper than getting 2 tickets for this weekend, and 5 for march, plus we get free parking now and can come and go as we like and all sorts of other little discounts on things we shouldn't be spending our money on. Basically this is our big splurge for the year. We're kind of looking at this as a much needed vacation after a year so far filled with 2 major surgeries, numerous trips to the ER, partial and then full unemployment among many other stresses. Plus we could really use some fun before his next big surgery come November.