Club Punta Fuego

Daniel's parents came for a visit and got here late Friday night. It is so good to see them and have them see Isaiah for the first time as well as spend some more time with JoAnn. On Saturday Daniel talked his dad into playing in a basketball game so we took JoAnn to watch Daddy and Papa play "baskball." Then on Sunday we came here to Punta Fuego for a few days to have a little vacation. The views here are amazing. Its right on the ocean on the southern part of Luzon and truthfully I have never seen a place like this in the Philippines. It feels like a completely different country. You have to be a member to come and one of our Filipino friends was kind enough to get us in on her membership. So far we haven't made it much past the golf course (well not me) and the pool. Here is a picture of Daniel and JoAnn enjoying the pool during the hot hot hot season.

2 Months

Tuesday marked 2 months since Isaiah was born. I seriously can't believe he is already 9 weeks old tomorrow. Anyway, I wanted to take a few pictures of him to celebrate the 2 month mark. Here are a few of my favorites on this camera. I have another camera that I took most of the pictures with, but it is an old school film Minolta camera so I won't be posting those since I really detest the scanner and that would be the only way.

Of course JoAnn had to get in on the action.
I'm not sure what JoAnn was doing in this one, but I think Isaiah's face is priceless.

Birthdays and Smiling

Lets take care of the birthday first. On Tuesday it was my grandma's birthday. I actually got to talk to her on the phone last Saturday when my mom went to go see her so that was fun. I miss her so much and can't wait to go back home and just go hang out with her for a day. I really want JoAnn and Isaiah to go see her. Anyway, here is a picture of JoAnn and I with her this past summer when we were celebrating JoAnn's 2nd birthday. She is such a sweet lady and I love her dearly. Happy birthday Grandma.


Now for the smiling. I finally was able to get a decent picture of Isaiah smiling and to make it even better it was while I was trying to get some pictures of him for his passport. I am hoping they will let us have this be his passport picture.

I also took him in for his two month check up yesterday and he now weighs 11 lbs 10 oz. and is 24 inches tall. He is growing so fast. What is really crazy for me to think about though is that about a year and a half ago one of my friends gave birth to her son that was pretty much the same size as Isaiah is now. I can't imagine!

We All Scream For Ice Cream

The other day I was watching TV and saw on a cooking show some people talking about cooking for vegans. We are not vegans, but I do sometimes look for vegan recipes since they are milk free and both of the kids are allergic to milk. Anyway, they got on the subject of dessert and one of them mentioned coconut ice cream. As in using coconut milk instead of cow's milk. I've seen rice milk ice cream but crazy enough it has soy in it and JoAnn is also allergic to soy. So, until I heard of using coconut milk I had ruled out the idea of ice cream for her and stuck to sorbet. It wasn't long before I started searching the web for recipes since one of our friends has an ice cream maker I could borrow and found one for chocolate coconut ice cream. I thought that sounded great and since it was only 4 ingredients I figured it couldn't be hard to make. So, the other day I made the first batch of ice cream that JoAnn could eat and after dinner last night she got to try it for the first time. She was so cute. I only gave her about the equivalent of 5 bites, but she sat at the table until she ate every last drop. She LOVED it. At one point she even tried licking the bowl. It actually was pretty good. I can't wait to try other recipes and I'm so excited to actually be able to serve ice cream with her birthday cake this year.

Oh, Ew, Yuck!

As JoAnn would say "Oh, Ew, Yuck!" I can't say that enough right now because I keep thinking about the nest of cockroaches we found today. Where? In an out of the way closet that never gets used, in the hallway right outside of the door to our condo, or maybe even somewhere in the bathroom we never use. No, of course not. Instead they were alive and well right inside of the drawers at the bottom of JoAnn's bookshelf, just feet from where she sleeps.

We had decided that we wanted to go through all of our stuff especially stuff we hardly if ever use and get rid of anything we aren't going to move with us. Well, Daniel was the one who had taken on the challenge of JoAnn's room and when he opened one of the drawers he saw a bunch of little dark things scatter. There were so many roaches I wasn't even sure where to begin killing them all. Thankfully most of them stayed in the drawer so Daniel put the drawer in the bathroom and took out everything while Ate Ida started swatting away with a shoe. Daniel also returned to the bookshelf to find the mother and a few more of her offspring and he was able to kill them. Then he had the task of going through the stuff from the drawers and deciding what was able to be cleared of all cockroach poop and what needed to be thrown away while Ate Ida cleaned it up. Unfortunately, one of the things I had kept in the drawers was all of our pictures. The fortunate part was that they were in the drawer that wasn't as bad and most of them were fine. It was not what I was expecting to find during our spring cleaning, but I am very thankful I had help today and didn't actually have to do anything other than keep JoAnn out of the room while they were killing the bugs.

After the whole cockroach problem was solved it was time for JoAnn's nap, which I had a hard time wanting to put her down even though I kept telling myself that there were less bugs now than there were 30 minutes before and I would have been totally fine putting her down before. I guess it just proves ignorance is bliss.

He's smiling

I have been trying to get a picture of Isaiah smiling for a few days now, but every time I have the camera he usually is either sleeping or crying. Well, tonight at dinner I was holding him and he started smiling, so I quickly grabbed the camera and snapped away. Unfortunately, the only picture I got of him with a smile the camera was a little too close for the flash and it sort of washed him out. I am going to keep trying, but I just love his smile so I had to put this up. You can't see it in the picture, but he has the cutest little dimple. He is really starting to smile a lot, so hopefully I will get a better picture soon.

Where to start???

I was planning on putting up a post a long time ago to give a shout out to Daniel's grandma, who turned 99 on March 27. 99!!! You have to admit that is impressive. I guess they had a birthday party for her at the nursing home where she lives and Daniel's brother along with his family were able to go celebrate with her. So, here is a picture of them. I think she looks great for being 99.


The reason I hadn't gotten to that yet was because I was going to include taking JoAnn to a PBA game the next day on Sunday, but at the game I started to feel pretty sick. I'll get to the whole being sick thing in a minute, first let's talk about the game.

Daniel has a couple friends who play for a professional basketball team here called Santa Lucia. I guess whenever Daniel talks to them they like to give him a hard time because after being here as long as we have he has never gone to see a PBA game. He and I have both been to quite a few college games, but never a professional game. Anyway he ran into his friend he found out there was a game on Sunday and it was only a few minutes from where we lived. So Daniel and I decided it would be fun for us to find a babysitter for Isaiah and give us a special outing with just JoAnn.

Not long after getting there I started to feel really sick. I knew I had a fever because I was in a gym without air conditioning during hot season and I was shaking I was so cold. In an effort to try to make it a special night with JoAnn, I just decided to power through it and stick out the rest of the game. I will admit that when they were behind by almost 20 at half, that seemed like a nearly impossible task, but I'm glad I did because they came back and cut the lead to just a few points by the end of the game. It was really fun to watch JoAnn and Daniel cheer together.


JoAnn also loved taking pictures with the camera.


Alright, now to the whole sickness thing. Like I said it started Sunday at the game, but I went home and took some Tylenol, got the fever down and as good of a night's rest as you can with a 5 week old. The next day on Monday, I had a follow up with my OB and we needed to take Isaiah in for his check up/shots. (By the way Isaiah came in weighing 4.9 kgs./10 lbs 13 oz and measuring 63 cm/24.8 inches. I haven't double checked his height yet.) So we went to the doctors, I mentioned that I had been feeling sick and my doctor looked me over, told me to get a CBC and then talk to her again. Well, as we were leaving the hospital the fire alarm went off and I wasn't about to stop to get a blood test done with the alarm going off. The next day I had planned on going somewhere in the morning with a friend and was just going to get the test done after I got home. However, once I got home I wasn't even sure I could make it from the car to our place I felt so sick. I knew the fever and chills had come back and when I got home I realized I had a giant red rash on my stomach.

I really wasn't sure I could make it anywhere and thought maybe the red spot was just from the pressure of the seat belt and the way I had been sitting in the car, so I took some more Tylenol and took a nap. When I woke up I was going to head in to get the blood test done when I noticed the red spot hadn't gone away and went all the way down to the scar from the c section. That made me a little nervous, so I decided it was time to be seen by a doctor and headed in to the emergency room. They saw me at the ER, referred me to the OB and sent me to be seen by my OB's resident. She looked at it, wasn't sure it was from the c section and referred me to an infectious disease doctor to make sure, but the ID doctor would only see me if I was admitted to the hospital. So, between that and the fact my fever wasn't going down they decided to admit me. For the first time in my life I was admitted to the hospital for something other than having a baby. Well, to make a long story short it took a couple days, but they finally diagnosed me with erysipelas. It is an infection of one of the layers of skin. I know my eczema puts me at a higher risk for getting it and I'm guessing that the fact I was still recovering from surgery made me that much more prone to getting it. Anyway, after three nights in the hospital and some IV antibiotics they finally sent me home. They were able to get rid of the fever the first night and other than the spot on my stomach being painful to the touch I instantly felt better. So, by the time I got to go home, I actually felt just fine. The only lasting effect is the giant red patch I have on my stomach and the antibiotic pills they sent me home with. Oh, and the fact that I was told not to nurse while taking the antibiotics, which I think is the worst part of this whole thing. So, between trying to keep up my milk supply and still having to feed Isaiah a bottle, my day has quickly gotten very busy.

Tomorrow I'm going to take Isaiah in for a check up to talk to the doctor about the formula I have him on. I knew he had a hard time with milk and when we tried soy formula, he threw most of it up. So he is on a hypo allergenic formula right now, which really is only partially hypo allergenic and he gets a rash from it and tends to throw up quite a bit more than usual. Unfortunately, they don't have anything that is any more hypo allergenic here, so I wanted to see what the doctor thinks I should do. This is about the time where I really get annoyed by allergies. At least it is only temporary though.

***Quick update...I hadn't had a chance to add the pictures when I wrote this the other day, so I've already been to see the pediatrician and she gave me wonderful news. I can nurse while on the antibiotic. I don't know who was more excited me or Daniel. If I nurse it gets him out of having to take a turn feeding Isaiah in the middle of the night. Which he actually is sleeping around 6 hours right now, so I don't think its too bad to get up. Anyway, this was a new doctor that I had used once while she was filling in for someone and loved her but her office is much farther away than the one that I had been using. I was a little hesitant to commit myself to driving that far every time I needed to take one of the kids to the doctor. Well, with something more than just a check up and shots to talk about I decided I really wanted one that I liked and trusted. Anyway, all that to say she measured Isaiah again and he was only 60 cm and 4.9 kg. I think her measurements are much more accurate. I actually really like this doctor and think I'm finally sold on the idea of having to drive an extra 20-30 minutes to see a doctor that I like so much.