An early Christmas

Now that Thanksgiving... I mean Halloween... I mean Labor Day... I mean the 4th of July is over, its time to start getting into the spirit of Christmas! In a year of belt-tightening and economic unease, most people we know are planning a "less is more" kind of holiday, and here in Slavik-land, the festivities have begun!


Will's sidelyer arrived with a THUD on the front porch yesterday morning. No lie... the box for this thing is 4 ft tall by 6 ft wide by 2 ft deep. Inside was a sidelyer and about 40 gallons of recycled foam packing material. That was fun for Nate to clean up :)

Thankfully for us, our insurance company agreed to pay for the whole thing! So here is a picture of Will in his new sidelyer. Don't let the smile fool you, the contraption isn't a whole lot of fun. Because of his decreased muscle tone, Will has a very hard time bringing his hands to the middle of his body (a key skill in life). The sidelyer puts him in a position where he must hold his head straight and he is able to bring his hands to the middle with the assistance of gravity. This teaches him what having his hands in the middle of his body feels like, thereby increasing the possibility that he will do it when out of the sidelyer. We try to load him up with as many fun, musical and lit toys as possible.

In addition, we (really, Will) were just accepted into a joint program between the UNC and Duke biomedical engineering departments where a graduate level biomedical engineering student team will come into our home, assess our needs, develop a tool or toy or contraption that will make some aspect of our lives easier, build it, and then give it to us (with our agreement that we won't patent the idea). So in essence, we are someone's design class project... but we don't mind because it will be useful and free! We have some ideas for things that would be beneficial to our family and Will, but really as a part of the class, the students are supposed to come up with the ideas. The initial intake with the professors is next week, and the students will be assigned the project in the second week of January.

The last little bit of early Christmas cheer is that Will and Luke received their second of 6 Synagis shots yesterday, and WILL GAINED WEIGHT! He had been stuck at exactly 20 pounds for a long time, and gained 8 ounces in the past month! This is a HUGE deal for us, as we have been working very hard with a feeding therapist and nutritionist to get to this point. We still have a long way to go just to get Will onto the growth chart, but this is clear and documented progress! We couldn't be prouder of Will.