Just breathe

It's hard to believe that summer is wrapping up so soon. Grades are due on Tuesday so as soon as I finish this stack of grading, I will be officially done with my crazy academic summer. Baby A finished her gymnastics class and got her "score card" for progress, which was cute. We will take a break for a couple of weeks and then start the first Fall class. She is saying she wants to be a ballerina princess so we may also start a dance class. Dance is more of a commitment than I really want to make, though. We will see.

We took Miss Madeline in to A's class for pet week. She did amazingly well with 24 sets of hands petting and poking her. No surprise there, though. 

She was pretty wiped out afterward, though!

The next day we had to take A for her routine pulmonology appointment. She has been doing fairly well but since our last appointment, she did have two coughing attacks that were more difficult to manage. Due to those along with the upcoming start of germ season (with back to school and winter just around the bend), the doctor decided it would be best to switch her Flovent to Advair (any other parents have littles on Advair?). We just finished the last of her Flovent this morning. As luck would have it, she seems to be in the middle of another episode. Hopefully, the Advair will help control it without having to use prednisone.  

In terms of stats, she is 28.4 pounds (20th percentile) and 36 inches tall (5th percentile)--still tiny and adorable (99th percentile in our book!). It's so funny that people continue to tell us how much she has grown when they see her. I'm not sure what optical illusions she has developed but they seem to be working.  

Of course in the midst of work stress and appointments and such, we also continued to deal with stress from Jasper. Since the beginning of May, we have had to keep a very close eye on him as he has been very destructive, with the purpose of eating everything in sight (I'm not even kidding--he has destroyed a door frame, my laptop bag, a conference bag, etc. and has eaten garbage, chewing gum, and a tube of sunscreen). This has lead to multiple visits to the vet, lots of ruined bedding and stains, restructuring our schedule and interactions with the dogs, etc. Chad and I have both been at our wits' ends, not knowing how to handle this. It turns out that he has a severe case of whipworms. He had been tested previously but apparently false negatives are really common. We have completed the first round of treatment but will have to do another round next month. We are hoping this helps with the behavioral and medical problems.

Otherwise, things are pretty good. We were hoping to be leaving for a trip to see family this week but with Chad's job and the cost of flights, it just wasn't feasible. Hopefully in the fall!