Micah did it!

Micah did it, and got the t-shirt. :-)

Thanks to Jennifer at Three's a Charm, Micah has a new t-shirt to show off. If you feel led, please buy an "I Did It" shirt for your little one. Jennifer is using the proceeds to buy books for parents who have received a Down syndrome diagnosis for their baby. Inside the front cover, she's putting a note saying who gave them the book and the blog address of that person. So hopefully one of these days I'll hear from someone who came to visit our blog and read about Micah! If you don't have a blog, or if you feel led, when you buy the shirt, ask Jennifer to put a blog address in the front cover anyway, whether it's our blog or another blog of a child with a little something extra.

And doesn't he look studly in the black shirt and jeans?

You might ask, "What did he do?" Well, I've mentioned some of it. But I thought it was a good time to share what Micah is doing these days.

1. Crawling... on all fours consistently (unless he's really tired and resorts to the army crawl, but that's happening less often these days).

2. Signing - Micah can do the following signs: more, ball, car, bus, eat and signing time (to request his video every morning). Also, in the photo above where it looks like he's signing "more," he's really doing the Itsy Bitsy Spider.

3. Verbal - Micah only says Dada consistently (which makes Mark's heart melt). He also yells loudly when he wants Nathan's attention. He's starting to click his tongue, which is great for building up strength.

4. Eating - Micah is now opening his mouth for baby food at the table. This is huge, because it means he doesn't have a total oral aversion. I'm sure part of it is due to him mimicking his baby brother (you know... the little piggy). Micah's tongue functions like a newborn, though, in that it doesn't draw food to the back, so most of the food is pushed out by his tongue. But we're working on tongue strength with him.

5. G-tube feeds - Micah now receives EVERYTHING through his G-tube so today we went to the pediatrician's office and had his GJ-tube button removed and replaced with a G-tube button. Praise God! No more trips to interventional radiology in Milwaukee every time he has a tube issue. It's taken a long time to get here. He's still on mostly continuous feeds (compared to bolus feeds, which is more like meals), so we still have to take the pump everywhere. But moving to all G-tube feeds is a major step and we definitely don't take it for granted. One of these days I'll post some photos of the difference between the tubes.

(For those of you astute blog readers, yes, he did get new glasses. I was planning to buy him some Specs4Us anyway, and by leaving his other glasses on top of the car, I expedited the purchase).

OT - I have to add these photos of Matthew because I'll forget to post them later. I call this one:

"I'm so hungry, I could eat a train!"