Updated 7/4/2008, by Neal: Now with even more photos! I just uploaded a bunch from last night. My brother Colin and his wife are in town, and I was a little crazy with my new camera. There’s a great series of Anna portraits there though!

Updated 7/5/2008, by Neal: Now with video! Turns out Flickr (the folks who host our photos) have started a new video service. I uploaded a movie of Anna dancing to “Happy Feet” there. Let us know how this works for you?

Which makes Anna’s new favorite game all the more fun. It’s called “nap time”. Basically, she puts a pillow or two on the floor, asks Mommy and Daddy to lay down on the pillow, and insists that we close our eyes while she puts a blanket on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off…

It’s the best game ever.

Updated: Here’s a photo of Colin and Roby playing “the best game ever” with Ms. Anna. 

I love you so much!

Thank you for your smile and for all the hugs and especially the snuggles. Thank you for reading me books and playing games, for taking me on adventures, and even for the tickles. Thank you for letting me eat yogurt and cookies and beets and green beans. Thank you for helping me wake up when I’ve had a bad dream, and for coming and sleeping in my room when I’m not feeling well.

Thank you for spending so much time with me. I love being around you so much! Thank you for teaching me to do things with my left — I know that’s important even if it makes me frustrated sometimes. Thank you for your confidence in me, and for teaching me how to be big and good.

I hope someday I can be as big and good as you.

I love you Mama.

Anna Rose

We were looking forward to a planned trip out to Kansas at the end of May to help her celebrate her birthday with her family — including her four grandchildren and five great-grandkids. I’m sure she would have loved to watch all the grand- and great-grandkids play together.

It’s too early for plans for a memorial service, but there’s a strong likelihood we’ll be heading home to Kansas at some point in the next week or so.

We love you and miss you terribly, grandma.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Anna Sings Happy Birthday (~1MB). You’ll need the latest version of QuickTime Player to view this movie. Here’s the link: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/
Enjoy!

March opened with a change in the lineup here on Team Anna. Tara’s mom flew out from Kansas on Saturday (3/2) so that she could pinch hit for me while I flew back to Colorado for a week of face time at work. Poor Debbie was sick as a dog when she arrived, but fortunately it turned out it wasn’t anything a whole bunch of medication (procured from a local urgent care) couldn’t fix in a couple of days.

Tara and her mom had a pretty good time of things during the week I was away. Anna made good progress in her therapy and in other ways as well. She’s suddenly able to count to 5 most of the time (sometimes higher?), and has a pretty decent grasp on her ABCs for somebody who’s not even two yet! She’s talking up a storm — still mostly two word sentences, but wow, the vocabulary is impressive. Meanwhile: Her therapists were very happy with her progress, and she’s now used to the (crazy busy) routine, which means she’s sleeping and eating well. She’s mostly healthy, too, which is new and different for everyone.

Lots of work and a bit of the stomach flu kept me pretty busy for the week I was away. It was good to see my folks and Max on Thursday evening, and I managed to make a bit of money at the poker game on Friday.  But I felt anxious the whole week and wanted to get back “home” to Birmingham.  (It’s very hard to be away from Anna and Tara for that long — I have no idea how parents who travel regularly do it).

Granny Debbie made a fantastic Dora the Explorer cake for Anna’s early birthday (pictures to follow?), which we all enjoyed on the evening I returned. Then Sunday morning (3/9) it was back to the airport to drop off Debbie, who’s apparently deep in the throes of Anna withdrawl as I write this. (Thanks so much for visiting and for all your help!)

So that brings us to this week, our last week of therapy. Anna got her cast off yesterday, which was pretty mind-blowing for everyone involved. Anna was frankly a little bit confused, and kept acting like she was expecting us to put the cast back on. It made us both happy to let her know that the cast is gone (at least for a while). And it was great to finally give the girl a real bath with plenty of bubbles, no rush, and no smelly cast to put back on afterwards!

We were thinking of taking her out to someplace fun like Chuck E. Cheese’s or McDonald’s to celebrate. But the combination of three weeks of not being able to use her right hand plus a bunch of new books and toys from her early birthday celebration this past weekend meant that Anna was really much more in favor of sitting at home and playing in relative peace and quiet. And who could blame her?

Everyone was expecting today to be a really tough therapy day. Anna’s historically really bad about using her left hand after she gets her cast taken off, and the therapists were ready for a major battle. But the girl continues to surprise, and she’s been unbelievably good about using both her hands or even just her left hand when we ask her to. (That’s the new therapy focus: bi-manual exercises). There’ve even been a couple of moments when she’ll use her left hand for a task without even thinking about it! In general, though, today was a great therapy day, and the therapists are really happy with what they’re seeing.

Friday’s our last day of therapy. We’ll have a few solid hours of therapy in the morning, and then we’ll relocate to the clinic at UAB for Anna’s “exit interview”. Saturday we’ll try to pack, clean up, and hopefully get outside to do something fun since the Ides of March is Anna’s official birthday. Sunday we’ll need to be out of our apartment by noon, and grab lunch somewhere on the way to the airport. Tara and Anna fly back to Denver in the afternoon, and after getting them on the plane I’ll start the long drive back home (ETA: Tuesday).

It’s hard to believe we’ve made it this far, and that we were able to survive three full weeks of 24/7 casting and intensive therapy. But we’d do it all again in a heartbeat. The gains have been impressive, and on the whole the last three weeks have been enormously positive for Anna on many different levels. She’s able to turn her hand over much further than she was able to before (even with Botox), she’s able to isolate her pointer and thumb, use a fork independently to stab food, and sit cross-legged. Her core strength and strength in her left hand and arm have improved dramatically. And almost as importantly, she’s really done a truly fantastic job listening and learning to follow directions — a very large challenge for someone so little — and with tolerating all the long hours of therapy.

We’re so very proud of our girl!

Anna is doing a great job with her therapy. Her therapists are constantly amazed at how hard the girl works. We do have our meltdowns from time to time, especially when they ask her to do something that is pushing her to the limit. For the most part, Anna does what her therapists ask her to do, but today she was either tired, frustrated or just demonstrating how terrible the twos can be. After days like today, I imagine the folks in the apartments around us wonder if we are skinning our child. Anna let out some of the most ear-piercing squeals/screams when she didn’t get her way today. It was truly a battle of the wills (and I’m not sure we (the adults) came out on top!).

Yesterday Anna had her first bath in a week. Yes, you read that correctly…ONE WEEK. For the first time in a week, Anna had her cast removed to check for any skin issues or irritations. She had a small blister between her middle fingers, but otherwise things looked fine. The smell…now that was a totally different story. Yuck. We gave her a bath and washed her stinky hair, and she enjoyed it so much that she didn’t want to get out. But all good things must end and the cast had to go back on. Surprisingly, putting the cast back on did not cause any problems. She actually cooperated completely.

I’ve been slowly posting more pictures. We hadn’t really posted any since before Christmas, so there is quite a backlog. Make sure to check previous pages on Flickr, as you’ll probably find newly posted pictures there as well.

But we did spend some time hiding out in the bathtub very early this morning. I was very soundly asleep, oblivious to any danger when Kansas girl Tara woke me up at about 3:30AM, having somehow heard the sound of distant tornado sirens. We turned on the TV in time to see a major front bearing down on our location, with the backup weather folks from the local news stations in a panic about the whole affair.

So we quickly pulled on some clothes and decided that the bathroom off our bedroom was probably the safest location. I threw all the pillows in the house in the bathtub while Tara went and grabbed a very groggy and confused Ms. Anna. The two of them huddled in the tub for about 20 minutes (with me standing by ready to jump in if necessary) until about 4:10AM, at which point the front had passed over us with lots of wind and rain and thunder, but without manifesting any actual tornadoes.

We brought Anna into bed with us and I think she and Tara managed to get another couple hours of sleep before the therapists showed up at 6:45AM. (I can’t sleep if I’m up around that time, but it was nice to lay in bed and snuggle with the little girl).

I guess I didn’t think of Birmingham being prime tornado country, but this is the second scare now in as many weeks!

Anna’s doing much better, health-wise. The steroids took effect almost instantaneously, and while she still has a runny nose and cough, at least she’s not croupy.

More importantly, by Wednesday she was pretty much sleeping through the night. She’s working so incredibly hard in her therapy that sleep itself has become something of a reward. After working her little tail off for six straight hours between 7:00AM and 1:00PM, she really looks forward to her afternoon nap(s). And for the past three nights she’s been reluctant to read books and has flat out refused to have us sing songs before we put her to bed. “Do you want to read another book?” “No.” “Do you want Mamma to sing songs?” “No. Seep”, she says. “Seep”.

Therapy has been going very well, and we’ve accomplished a great deal in just one week. But it has not been an easy road. The therapists work the girl very hard, and during the first couple of days she put up quite a fight. I think Wednesday was our lowest point. Tara had to leave the therapy session for about an hour because Anna was having a total meltdown and refused to comply with even the simplest request. Tara and I and her therapists all agree that it’s incredibly important for us all to help Anna realize that she’s not going to get out of therapy just by throwing a fit, but knowing that doesn’t really make it any easier on anyone when the poor girl is throwing a tantrum because she’s exhausted and sick and frustrated and all we want to do is stop the damn therapy session and give her hugs.

But the perseverance has started to pay off. By the end of the week there were far fewer tantrums, and today (Saturday) she had an amazingly positive therapy session, with not a single tantrum and some real milestones. She’s now able to bear significant weight on her left arm independently for several minutes, she’s really improved her supination (turning her left hand over with her palm up and open), she’s doing amazingly well with her pincer grasp (thumb and pointer finger) with tasks such as turning pages of a book or picking up small objects, and she was successful, for the first time today, in independently stabbing a piece of food with her fork and bring it to her mouth. Almost as important: She’s now starting to grasp the concept of delayed gratification — that when we say “do X now and you’ll get Y later”, she understands enough to work through the difficult task at hand for the promise of a reward later. This is a Very Big Deal for someone not even two years of age, and extremely important to making forward progress in therapy sessions.

It’s been a very long, very tough week, though. Poor Tara’s now managed to catch a cold (due to lack of sleep and way too much stress), and nobody’s happy when Momma’s sick, let me tell you. I’ve been trying to keep up at work, but it’s honestly been much more difficult than I’d expected to be super-productive and engaged when I’m 1,300 miles and a time zone away and always a little bit exhausted from stress and lack of sleep. And while it’s been great to touch base with some family and friends by phone or video chats, it usually just reminds us how lonesome it can be here away from our home. We miss our family, our friends, and our usual routine. And of course we really miss Max.

After six straight days of therapy we get tomorrow off. We’re going to try and get out of the apartment and roam around a bit, though it’s also possible we’ll just relax at home. We’ll start our second week on Monday, with our therapists arriving extra early (to make up for lost time at the doctor’s on Tuesday) at 6:45AM! (Our therapists, it should be said, “kick ass” — to use the technical term — and we’re extremely happy with all they’ve done and are doing).

In light of our lack of a good night’s sleep and Anna’s illness, we opted to cancel our therapy for this afternoon. We got in 2 1/2 hours before we left for the doctor - that leaves 3 1/2 hours that we will need to make up. They are very serious about making sure that Anna receives her 6 hours of therapy per day! I suppose if they have a method that works, they should stick with it. I have to admit that it all seemed a bit rigid today. My parental instincts wanted to say…”hey, back off…can’t you see she doesn’t feel well?” Every few minutes were filled with crying, which led to a runny nose, which led to a cough, with led to the barking, etc. etc. Surprisingly, she did quite well this morning despite her lack of sleep and nasty cough. She’s such a tough little thing.

This evening we talked online with “Henny” (Anna’s cousin, Henry) and aunt Jo. It was great to see them both, and made us realize how much we do (will) miss them. Anna became really upset when it was time for us to say good-bye. She just kept saying “Henny, Henny, Henny…no, Henny.” It was just very difficult to end the call. Both the kids seemed confused that they just couldn’t get together to play. Distance is a hard concept for the kidlets.