He who eats a lot.

Just a small update about baby Steven. Now that he is 4 months old, he is allowed to eat cereal and baby food. He has eaten baby cereal, applesauce and sweet potatoes. Once we get some pics we will be sure to update. He absolutely loves it and makes a huge mess of himself and whoever is feeding him.

Love you all
Steve, Holly, Steven, Olivia

The Good the Bad & the Baby

As some of you may know Olivia was in the hospital. Well here is the story. It started on Sunday Aug 6th with a cold that both the twins got, by Tuesday they were both doing better. Then Olivia started having trouble keeping food down. So we took her in to Hillcrest hospital on Wednesday. They gave her an IV of fluids then got her to keep some formula down and sent us home. The next day she still could not keep anything down. So on Friday we took her back to the hospital. They again gave her an IV of fluids but this time they also decided to X-ray her chest. They where unsure about what she had and by this time she had gone a day or so with out a bowel movement. They admitted her for observation. On Saturday, when she woke up her stomach as very distended (bloated) so they sent her down for an X-ray of her tummy. The X-ray reveled she had a bunch of gas but they couldn't see her intestines so they sent us back down for an ultrasound of her stomach. The ultrasound reveled she had Intussusception . Which if you think of a telescope and how it folds in on itself that is what her intestines had done. It's common (but not so common) in children after they've had a virus, in her case the cold. The lymph nodes on her intestines had swollen due her cold and the intestines thought that the lymph nodes were a foreign food and tried to digest it, which in turn, they digested itself. So Hillcrest did not have the technology or the pediatric surgery staff to deal with this, and they transferred us by ambulance to The Cleveland Clinic. When we got to The Cleveland Clinic the surgeon informed us that there were two types of treatments to try. The first being a less invasive air anemia and the second being surgery. So on Saturday they did the air anemia, which seemed to work, the ultrasounds showed that her bowels were moving and she started to pass gas immediately. However, when she woke up on Sunday her stomach was very distended again. The doctors immediately scheduled surgery for that afternoon. They had to remove 7 inches of Olivia's lower intestines. After a stay in the Picu (pediatrics intensive care unit) Olivia was released back to her hospital room where the healing begin. She had a tube in her stomach until Wednesday which meant she wasn't allowed to eat till it was removed. But once they removed it, the eating began, she did ok till Wednesday night when she threw up so they decided to keep her over night on Thursday to see how things went. Thursday went very smoothly with out any problems and they let us bring her home Friday. She's been doing better every day, and she's evening starting to smile more often. She is now afraid of people she doesn't know, she probably thinks they are going to poke her, but hopefully she will get over that.
We would like to thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers; it definitely provided us with comfort in those trying moments.
Thanks again!!
Love
Steve, Holly, Steven and Olivia!!

P.S. for more information on intasussuception see

http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic385.htm