This past week our Genevieve turned 22 months old!
The big news from this past month is that Genevieve finally had her ophthalmology appointment. As with many children’s specialists these days, they have long wait times and very few appointments. We waited six months for this appointment. Genevieve has had a lazy left eye since birth. For the past few months, we’ve had her wear an eye patch for a couple of hours a day. Wearing the patch over her good eye helps strengthen her weak eye.
The ophthalmologist was glad that we’ve been patching and wants us to increase it to four hours per day. We’ll still be looking at eye surgery for Genevieve in early 2024. The goal with the increased patching is to keep strengthening the weak eye and consequently, increase the chances of the surgery working.
We’re still getting our heads around this information. Facing surgery for a toddler is new territory for us and definitely scary. But it also feels good to be making progress toward getting Genevieve in a better place with her vision.
Genevieve continues to improve her walking each month. She initiates walking on her own all the time at home and reverts to crawling much less frequently. Genevieve is still less confident outside. However, she’s more willing, especially with assistance. We’ve had several PT sessions now, which is definitely contributing to her progress.
Olivia has started singing her favorite songs. Genevieve is doing her best to keep pace with Olivia. The two of them request and sing along to Wheels on the Bus and Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes constantly. We do the horn verse for Wheels on the Bus so much in the car that I actually put Diggy Diggy Hole back in our regular rotation. The older three kids went through a huge obsession with Diggy this summer, and we all burned out on it. But we had given Diggy a bit of a break, and I can only sing “beep beep beep” so many times ha.
Genevieve has been drooling a ton this past month and still chewing on everything, which most likely means that she’s teething. She’s still missing a few incisors and doesn’t seem to be cutting any right now. So I would guess that she’s cutting molars. Genevieve is big on biting us when we do anything involving her mouth, so I haven’t done a new tooth count.
With Olivia in school a couple of days a week, it’s just me, Genevieve, and Annie on those days. Genevieve doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s used to spending a ton of time playing with Tommy and Olivia. I love having the 1:1 time with Genevieve, especially while Annie is so little, and being able to get a bit more done around the house.
Olivia has really taken off with her eating over the past few months. Genevieve continues to eat more as well. We’ve finally reached the point where I’m making more food at meals and putting together full plates of food for each of the three older kids. Tommy remains a very picky eater. I do my best not to make a big deal about it, continue to encourage him to try what we’re eating, and have easy food options on hand for him when he doesn’t want to eat what we’re eating. It’s very nice to have two kids who do want to eat what we’re eating the majority of the time.
Olivia and Genevieve started a new music class a few weeks after Tommy started kindergarten. I completely unenrolled them at the end of July. I couldn’t do it anymore physically, and I wanted a break before Annie arrived. Then she came early, and there were still lots of openings for the fall semester, so I got them in another class sooner than planned. It’s so good to be back.
You can find all of my baby/toddler updates for all of the kids as well as general family updates and other family-related posts in the family section of the blog.
