Life has not slowed down for us yet. Marylou is still very ill and now has patient sitters 24 hours a day at the hospital. This is costing her over 9 grand a month. What burns me up about this is that the hospital staff SHOULD be doing the tasks that the sitters are doing.

On a positive note, James is finally HOME for GOOD after having worked in New Orleans for the past 6 months. He is now working as a health and safety officer here in Pensacola with the same company. I feel spoiled having him home every night!

Nathan is having some serious digestive issues. A few days ago he started having VERY frequent bowel movements (his usual has been 3-7 a day for the past 6-8 months or so), but he started having like 15 in a 12 hour period. Not diarrhea. But not normal. They had blood in them. He would strain to have them and he has never strained before. He also has a diaper rash above ALL diaper rashes. And a very concerned momma. Prior to this, we had already set up food allergy testing on the 9th of this month due to his intolerance of certain foods. He has now officially been diagnosed with "poor weight gain". He's been growing in other areas - height and head circumference, but just not gaining weight. He weighs 20 lbs 8 ounces. He's been at 20 pounds for several months. Lots of people have said not to worry about it, and I haven't - for the most part. His development has been right on cue, but I have always been aware of his intolerance to certain foods, his frequency and messy consistency of his stools, etc. We waited too long, in my opinion, to start this testing. I dropped off 4 containers of stool for testing this morning. He will undergo blood tests, skin tests and possibly a small intestine biopsy (to rule out celiac disease - an intolerance to wheat) We have eliminated soy milk from his diet and he still cannot have any dairy. Feeding him remains a challenge. Because of his rash, no juice. We are trying to get him to drink rice milk (not going over too well.)

I hope to hear some results from the stool samples later this week. I don't care what the results are; I just need to know the problem so I can take care of him properly. I feel that I am poisoning his little body by not knowing what he can digest.

Nathan and I will be heading to NC with my parents next week to visit my grandparents, Honey and Daddy Jess. The baby's due date (7/15) falls right during their annual family reunion - so we are going to spend time with them while I can still travel. I can't wait!

We are slowly preparing the house for our new arrival. We have painted the Florida room (which will now become the office), and are in the process of moving the spare room into the current office and preparing a room for Nathan in the current spare room. We also have obtained a king sized bed from Marylou (very old but hopefully sleepable) for our room and plan on putting our current Queen in the new spare room and putting the full sized bed from the spare room into Nathan's new room. I thought for awhile that we would put the full sized box springs and mattress on the floor for him and use bed rails on the two sides that are not up against a wall. He moves quite a bit in his sleep and I think he will still need some boundaries. The nursery will stay the nursery.

Lots of work and little time to get it done. What else is new?