Catching Up

Excuse me just a second while I clear the cobwebs and dust from this little old blog of mine…

I've been busy recently and in an attempt to make my life a little less chaotic, I haven't been blogging. So if you'll give me just a few minutes, I'll give you a quick and dirty update on all of us.

Mr NoVa, or should I say 2Lt NoVa
That's right, Mr NoVa successfully completed the 10 week Officer Candidates Course he started way back in October. He graduated on 11 December and accepted his Commission as an Officer in the United States Marine Corps that same day. Here is where you expect to see a nice family picture of the three of us at the Marine Corps Museum beaming with pride and anticipation of what the future holds for our little family.

Tumbleweeds blowing through the post…

Yeah, thanks to someone having recently mastered a) running and b) sliding out the front of his stroller there are no family pictures. The most touching family picture of the day probably would have been me standing in front of the famous white bus that takes Marine recruits to boot camp on Parris Island and threatening to put Michael on there to wait the remaining 16 years, 11 months and 2 weeks until he turned 18 and could start boot camp.

The hubs is now back at Quantico getting ready to start the next phase of his training. If all goes as expected we should be finding out what his permanent duty station will be something in June or July with a move to follow shortly thereafter. We are hoping for an East Coast assignment to Camp Lejeune but on these cold winter days the warmth of Camp Pendleton or 29 Palms in Southern California sounds mighty appealing.

Michael
Michael is thoroughly enjoying life as a toddler and has mastered the art of terrorizing his Mother with his antics. There are times when I can literally see the wheels turning in his little brain – You know, I bet I could end up in the hospital for some more stitches and maybe even a concussion if I climb on the couch and then dive head first into the coffee table. Mom would really lose her shit over that – All in all though, he is becoming more and more of a joy every day. He claps and dances all the time now and gives the best kisses EVER. Seriously.

His hearing continues to be a concern however, and it looks like we are heading to the OR in a few weeks to have tubes put in. To catch you up, Michael has something called a pre-auricular pit in his left ear which has been linked to a slightly higher incidence of full or partial deafness. The health department in VA requires all newborns with pits to have hearing tests done once every six months for the first three years of the child's life. While he (barely) passed his newborn hearing screen, Michael completely failed his six month OAE, a hearing test that tests the function of the eardrum. Because of this and the fact that he was not babbling at all, we moved on to a more advanced test that tracked how sound travelled through his ear and into his brain (these are all quick and dirty explanations, let me know if you want more details). Fortunately he passed this test with flying colors and we were told that the previous failure was just a fluke.

Well a mother's intuition is a powerful thing and something just didn't seem right to me. I was proved right when Michael once again failed his one year OAE and then had an abnormal tympanogram (a test to measure pressure in the ear, usually caused by fluid). We met with an ENT shortly before Christmas who confirmed that more than likely Michael has a collection of sterile fluid in his ear (not an infection) that is preventing his ear drum from vibrating and dulls all the sounds coming into his left ear. So while his hearing is completely normal in his right ear, we sound like the teacher from Charlie Brown in his left ear. We have a follow up appointment on the 19th of January to confirm that the fluid hasn't miraculously drained on its own and then at that point we will move on to having tubes put in. While no Mom looks forward to their child being sedated and sent to an OR, we have experience since his follow up hearing test at six month required him to be put completely under sedation. I'm hopeful that once we get this issue corrected that Michael will finally start making strides with his language development and that we can't prevent any long term delays caused by his hearing issues.

NoVa
I suppose I should give a quick update on me, though I feel like I've been so wrapped up with my boys that nothing much of importance has gone on in my own life. The one major happening is that less than a year after returning from maternity leave I turned in my resignation. Of course, it's hard to call it a resignation when I agreed to stay on until they find, hire and train my replacement and since I will more than likely be staying on as some sort of part time consultant, but still, I won't be a full time employee anymore. Even while on maternity leave, I never would have seriously considered something like this as an option but as our lives have changed so too have my goals. I want to be there to support my husband and to have some additional time to spend with Michael since the days are going by much too fast. I'm looking forward to this new chapter in my personal and professional life and feel blessed that I seem to have found a close to perfect arrangement.

There is also that little matter of trying to add to our family. We've been actively trying since my second early m/c in September, but in order to have a baby you have to have sex and it has to be within a specific time frame of your cycle. Considering that I was lucky to see my husband for 24 hours once every two weeks while he was at OCS it's not at all surprising that our efforts have been unsuccessful. We are continuing to work on it though and as Mr NoVa says, practice makes perfect. We are both looking forward to what the start of 2010 has in store for us in that department.

Well, that should sufficiently catch you all up on what the past few weeks have been like here at the NoVa house. This past year has been a year of highs and lows for sure, and I am excited to see what 2010 has in store for us. And hopefully I'll do a better job of keeping the blog updated as we go.