Sunday, August 4, 2013

And now we return to regularly scheduled programing

First I need to apologize to those who have donated and have been checking to see where we are on our earnings for Daniel's service dog. I have not updated anything in awhile and that's partly due to the amazing summer weather we have been having this summer. (In Alaska it's enjoy every good day because there usually aren't this many of them!) It has been wonderful spending so much time at parks and outside. The other reason for not updating is  that this has been a very difficult summer for all of us. Daniel has experienced significant regression in his behavior to levels never seen before and this has placed a huge stress on all of us. We've had to up his medication that regulates his mood twice and he's back at adult levels. Reagan has also been acting up due to this so I have had my hands very full just trying to not land in the nut house myself.  But the good news is that we have continued to earn and I will try and update the banner in the next couple of days but our current total for the dog is.....
 $4312!!
We have also come to a fork in the road for Daniel. He has experienced chronic constipation since he was about 17 months old. We've now tried all the medications that there are out there for it, changed his diet and tried alternative medicines. For one reason or another none of them work. Because of that he is probably going into surgery this week to have a cecostomy tube put in. This is a tube that is the same as a feeding tube that they insert into the stomach but it will instead be inserted into his upper intestine and it will be permanent but can be taken out at at later date. We will flush it out every night in order for him to have a bowel movement. I'm told it takes about 45 mins each night. The surgeon is talking about doing some other things as well. We meet with him in the morning to find out what's going to happen for sure. Daniel will be in the hospital for several days so we are flying my Mom up to spend a week with us to help care for Reagan.

In other news, because this was such a difficult summer we have decided that Daniel will be going to public school this year and I will be homeschooling Reagan to give her some special time with me and give both of us a break. Daniel was able to get into a charter school that I'm hopeful will be the right fit for him.We are hoping that a new ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) will be able to take him next month and that will also be a huge help for us and the school.

I'm really hoping that I will be able to post a few things that we were able to do this summer. Because we did do some fun things and it wasn't all bad.