better

Claire is feeling much better. She has one more tooth on the bottom too for a total of 7. I figure the 4th bottom tooth is soon to follow then maybe we'll have a break from teething.
I forgot to mention there are more photos on Flikr.

Sick

Please pray for Claire...she developed flu symptoms during the night. Pray for me too as I'm running on less than 3 hrs sleep. The only way I could get Claire to sleep in the wee hours was to hold her and rock her.

News

Claire suddenly has 6 teeth. Starting on June 16th she began showing new ones on a regular basis. Now she has four on the top and two on the bottom.

She has been a bit more adventurous with eating solid foods. For a while she was only willing to eat Cheerios. Lately she's tried rice pilaf, watermelon, plum and sweetpotato.

She also has has some two hour naps in the past couple days! Wow! You may remember she used to be queen of the 30 minute nap...not anymore. We got an Amby motion bed on ebay recently and it's made a big difference for napping and ease of settling in to sleep. She has also been sleeping a 4 hour stint from 8pm-12am. She had been sleeping 2-3 hour stints and sometimes waking for an hour or more during the nights when the teething was bothering her.

New Chicken salad recipe:
chopped hearts of romaine
arugula
diced leftover grilled chicken
diced leftover baked potato
corn
grapes (halved)or avocado
toss with vinaigrette

Vids

Catch up on seeing Claire videos:

Big Girl

Claire thinks that she is a big girl now. She has to hold a spoon while I'm feeding her mushy food, so usually we each have one. When she drops hers she wants mine. She tries to feed herself a little and enjoys chewing on the spoon. She loves feeding herself Cheerios. She isn't much interested in other "finger foods."

Claire now helps pull shirts down over her head. She likes to stand for as much of clothes changing time as she can.

She only likes to face out when I'm carrying her around the house. If I try to carry her on my hip she immediately turns around.

Claire will take a few steps when supported to reach a desired object. She has pushed herself forward while lying on her tummy and is good at pivoting to change the direction she's facing while on her tummy. She can sit unsupported for a long time now but still doesn't know how to get back onto her tummy when she get's tired of sitting. (She just flops over or leans back.)

The Ocupational Therapist came for the first time on Friday. I was happy to learn that she is a Christian and has a special needs daughter who is grown up now. I think OT will be more fun for Claire than Physical therapy is. Claire has become resistant to many of the things the PT wants her to practice.

She had an allergy test (a blood test in which they look for antibodies that are specific to common allergens.) It turns out Claire is allergic to Milk, various nuts, wheat, eggs, soy, dust and cats. She had two other blood tests which showed that she is not anemic (but rather quite healthy) and doesn't have high levels of lead.

Claire's MRI is scheduled for July 18. I am concerned about it because they will have to sedate Claire since she can't lay still for an hour for the proceedure.

Her sleep pattern has been terrible this past week. She's been waking every two or three hours. Last night was worse... she woke up at 1:00 and we would get her to sleep for only a few minutes at a time until 3:15 when she finally went to sleep and slept til 7:00. Maybe teething plus itchies plus warm weather is a bad combination.

Tired and Cranky

Claire has beed sleeping terribly the past three nights with last night being the worst. She also has been getting progressively more itchy since we stopped using Dermasoothe skin oil. We ended up dabbing some hydrocortisone on the most troulesome patches but Claire gets itchy in places that don't look red or inflamed. She was naving such a bad day today that I used the Dermasoothe. Within an hour she was a new child. We had a lovely couple of hours until her naptime and she has been sleeping soundly for an hour and a quarter.

She got her one year shots the other day and a blood test to check for antibodies against typical food alergens. We should find out Monday if she is alergic to something. (Avoiding food alergens could help in managing her eczema.)