selfies

Will recently discovered his love of the camera. He will often grab it when I am feeding Lauren or otherwise distracted.


Here are some photos he took recently. It is interesting to see the world from his eyes, as well as what he thinks is worth capturing. There were several carpet shots. When he saw me upload the pictures to the computer he was very proud of the pictures he took of the TV. There were lots of those too. "Shiny, Tiny, Don!"


But far and away he's taken the most pictures of his face.



This one's my fave. Love the artistry of the drool en route to the camera.

epidermis

Lauren is a wonderful baby. She is sweet, smiley and generally content most of the time. But she's not low maintenance.


This girl has some extremely sensitive skin, and we've spent a lot of time this past week trying to figure out what is wrong and how we can help her feel better.

Basically, she has cradle cap on her scalp and face, eczema and an ulcerated, infected hemangioma.

The hemangioma has been causing us the most problems. It's on her back. And she's a baby, so she spends a lot of time on her back. Due to her dry skin and it's location it became ulcerated, causing her a fair amount of pain and discomfort. I feel stupid that it took me so long to realize that the scream-cries I would get when I laid her down weren't just because she wanted to be held or didn't want to go to sleep.

We are now moisturizing her with Vaseline multiple times a day, washing and dressing her hemangioma twice a day, washing her hair with medicated shampoo, and using two additional prescription ointments as needed. In the meantime we've tried mineral oil, CeraVe, Eucerin and Cetaphil, which have helped in varying degrees.

It has been surprisingly difficult to keep her hemangioma covered. It is on the side of her back, and we've tried a many ways (gauze, tape, large band-aids, Duoderm, ace bandages) to keep it in place. Right now we are taping gauze to her back and then wrapping an ace bandage around her waist to keep it in place. It has worked the best yet, but it's far from perfect. Any ideas?

A side effect of all this is all scented lotions and washes are out, so our baby doesn't smell like a baby. She smells like a little old lady. :) In addition, she has to wear clothing with mitten cuffs because she scratches like crazy. Mittens alone don't work because she can get them off. So we've been rotating the 6 cuffed outfits we have that fit her (she's now over 13 lbs).

Since we visited the dermatologist things have gotten better, she appears to be more comfortable, and is sleeping again. For a few nights there she was waking up every 45 minutes or so and I was going insane from the lack of sleep.

Even though Lauren's skin has been a minor inconvenience we feel very blessed to have access to good doctors and that she is in such good health overall.

If my kids had facebook their statuses might read

Lauren John thinks sleeping at night is for chumps. Night is the new day.


Will John just learned this cool new word: mine.

kids say the darndest things

Sometimes I like to read the Ensign while I feed Lauren. Today while I was feeding her Will came over to us and asked for my "book." After I gave it to him he looked at the cover for a minute, then smiled at me and said, "Deeta! Hona!" Which interpreted means, "Santa! Liahona!"


Not exactly true, but Lehi does have a big beard, he's wearing red and white, sitting down surrounded by people and we just put our Christmas decorations away this morning.

I was actually pretty pleased, even proud, that he mentioned the liahona because that means he is getting something out of our nightly scripture reading. We try to read a story a night out of his scripture story book and we read about the liahona over a week ago. Unfortunately, my maternal pride was short lived. Less than an hour later he hit his head on the ground in frustration when I told him he couldn't watch Barney (again).