Kiera is 2 yrs old Today! Happy Birthday, Kiera Rose!

Pictures Not Particularly in Chronological order

Toddler Face Off


Kiera Signs "love"

Pretty in Pink

Wardrobe change before cake to save her dress from the red frosting. She felt the frosting shade was nice as lipstick too.

Kiera likes her cake

Concert Pianist Begins

Kiera Kisses Ariel on her card (upon request)

Walk with the animals

Reading her book from Grandma Hall on her chair from Grandma Wright.

Kiera's birthday bib at dinner. I forgot her booster chair amoung the two car loads of equipment and food required for this outing.

Eating the ball. Forget the food.

Kiera is not thrilled about sitting in the grass. She would rather stand.

I am so proud of the cake I made. I think Elmo turned out good enough to eat. :)

The cake I made for my nephew who just turned 9. I feel pretty punny.

Wow! It was bizarre celebrating Kiera's second birthday when she's only been home for 8 months. This was her first birthday party NOT IN THE HOSPITAL! Yeah! Of all things, we did it a little early on Saturday. It was a very nice family party, and I think her favorite gift was a little red piano from an out of town friend and loyal blog reader. :) Thank you so so much. I made her an Elmo cake, that I must say, was pretty cute. She did stick her fingers in it and taste the frosting a little, but got most of the red frosting all over my clothes. I looked more of a mess than she when it was all over. Kiera really enjoyed playing with her cousins at the party. My brother's 4 boys came in from Colorado which was new for her. She definitely gets that her cousin, Sarah, and she have more in common than the rest of the boy cousins, and she really likes to involve Sarah in playing. She would grab Sarah's hand and make her play the piano and read to her like she does with us. It was so cute to watch, especially considering last year's party, where Kiera ended up playing opossum (pretending to sleep) to block out the commotion, only opened one of her presents, and ended up being bagged during some of her party guests' visits.

My husband's parents came from California for the party and spent the last 6 days with us, so Kiera has had fun getting to know them. We went to the Butterfly Pavilion at the Bio Park and the Zoo on Sunday. It was hot, hot, hot! We had a little trouble with the ventilator battery, but it was generally a successful trip. We also ran into one of Kiera's regular NICU nurses near the elephants! She had Kiera one of the first times I held her and took care of her MANY, MANY times when she was very little those first 6 months in NICU. It was so neat that she would be someone we'd see at the zoo on (or near) Kiera's birthday! We had stopped by NICU last Wednesday when we were at a pulmo appt, but only a few were there who had worked with us. One of her favorite and pretty manly RT's cracked me up when I told him we were having an Elmo Birthday Party but that it had been hard to choose between that and Little mermaid. He said, "Yeah, I had a Little Mermaid party on my last birthday." :) My poor stepmother-in-law got to witness Kiera getting bagged yesterday. Kiera was napping and must have rolled and dumped vent water down her airway. It was a very rude way to wake up from a nap. She's been a little funky since that, and I had to bump her O2 to 4 liters and start 4 hour nebs again. I haven't had a nurse since a week ago Saturday, so it was really nice to have Jer's parents to help this week. (Oh, and my new nurse was supposed to start today...about an hour and half ago, and I haven't seen her yet. Oh well, I guess we're back to the drawing board. I have one to interview today at 10am).

We also had Kiera's optholmologist follow up last Thursday. It looks like we weren't very successful at correcting Kiera's lazy eyes through patching, so we are going ahead with planning her strabismus surgery to correct her lazy eyes and get them aligned. It will probably be next month. I hope everything goes well.

Just got a call from my new nurse who was supposed to be here. I guess she had to go out of town for something urgent and let the agency know, and apparently the agency was supposed to call me and didn't! Today is the first day of school...I guess its a d@$%n good thing I didn't take a teaching job. :) This agency is really sending me over the edge. Thank goodness for my PICU nurses! So........Sarah, if there are days you wanted this month that were already covered by the other nurse, call me girl. :) She'll be gone a while.

I guess that's it for now. I need to go up and get Kiera going this morning. I'll post pictures later today.

Love,
Therese