What's the story morning glory?

Well, it feels like not much has really happened since we last updated you all but then looking at our photos we thought we could squeeze in an update.

We're still waiting to see what's going to happen with Noah's tummy. Pretty much it's been lots of pooh and lots and lots of washing!! I hope we will get some advise on the options available to Noah in order to fix his unstable tummy. I'm half afraid that no one will think about it until we're under their noses. Unfortunately we will just have to wait and see and hope that the difference of opinions has been resolved and there is a clear direction for Noah.

Until then we're working on Noahs' development with regards to his core muscles and his mouth. Happily we can report that Noah is doing great in both areas.
He's getting a lot more physically active. He doesn't crawl or do the big things but he's mastering all the in-between steps. So it's all going in the right direction. Thijs does a lot of work with him, using his own belly as a nice soft training gym! You can see in the background that Noah has a baby size yoga/pilates ball. I think that's so cute as I'm using the adult version to retrain my tummy muscles! :)






With regards to his mouth development, he now has two canine or incisor tooth, (hoektand), with the other two pushing through. (He's also grown to 86cm, he is the amazing stretchy baby!!)
The speed at which his teeth keep growing through is having an impact on Noah eating as well as all the problems with his tummy. He is showing a lot of positive signs of being ready for food. He is now occasionally bringing toys to his mouth, he sticks his tongue out and he can make lots of different noises now. He can "click" his tongue, make kissing noises and his favourite is the gnashing of teeth - it's now a familiar sound at 2am!
Here you can see his tongue sticking out, he's looking very cute in his pyjamas watching his favourite character, Makka Pakka, on the telly.


Thijs was sitting opposite Noah enjoying his "witlof met ham en kaas", or chickory wrapped in ham with a cheese sauce. Noah was fascinated and so Thijs just gave him some mashed potato with some cheese sauce. As usual the camera was handy so we took this little film. What pleased us most was that he leaned in for the food, also stuck his tongue out to taste the food and as you can see, he is getting interested in cutlery - but he doesn't put it even near his mouth yet. Oh well, every little step is a step forward.




We decided to take Noah out for dinner to a family friendly Greek restaurant in the neighbourhood. We weren't able to do this earlier as he was on his oxygen. A great improvement with the new bigger canule is that he is off his oxygen again (oxygen and the candle light that is standard in all dutch restaurants don't really go together). He was immediately interested in the free ouzo that they offer you before dinner. "Hands off kid, this one's your fathers"!! :)


A bit of tzasiki went down well but the out and out favourite was Mummy's chocolate mousse. He took it off the spoon and managed to get a bit in his mouth, but most of it ended up everywhere else......


We covered the table as a precaution, but maybe we should have just covered Noah up.
So ... ouzo and chocolate cake ... yup, he's our kid alright. No doubt about it!

We had a big scare on Sunday, not with Noah this time but rather it was the electricity supply. Our electricity shut off and we had no power whatsoever. Not knowing if this was a street problem or just our house frightened me to death as Noah was sleeping on his breathing machine and it hit me how vulnerable we were.
Luckily it turned out to only be our house and the engineer came out and fixed the problem before the breathing machine internal power unit run out, which was twice lucky as it turned out that our reserve batteries were also very low on power!!
HUGE reminder that we have to be responsible and think of all sorts of disaster and recovery scenarios. I should know this, as in another life this was part of my work. The power outage was caused by the fact that we are supposedly pulling so much power that our master circuit breaker overloaded and cut out. It's not an easy problem to permanently resolve, but for now a new fuse will fix it. I really don't want to see our energy bill in January. Gulp!!
Needless to say all of the reserve batteries are fully charged now!


The useless battery-pack on the bed next to the charger.
Noah's breathing machine hooked up to the almost empty battery pack. It cut out after 10 mins but luckily there is an internal backup of 3 hours in the breathing machine itself.


I was so stressed out I almost didn't go but I'm so glad we did. A friend gave us two tickets to see Bjorn Again, an ABBA tribute band. They were playing in a local venue and we'd been looking forward to going to the concert because we knew it would be fun. It was fantastic. These aren't great photos but they do sum up the atmosphere.

Here is "Bjorn" doing an amazing guitar solo in front of a glitter ball - does it get any more disco than this??!!
"Agnetha" & "Bjorn"
The whole group were amazing and got the crowd really into the show. A great tribute band and a great gift. A very nice end to the week.