It’s about a time for an update. Emmie had a five month check up for her scoliosis in November. We met with the nurse practitioner at her orthopedic doctor’s office.
The Good New: Her curve has increased to 29 degrees but is still considered stable since it is still under a degree a month (last measurement was 27 degrees in June). Basically, we can say the brace is slowing down the curve progression.
The Bad News: Her spine is leaning significantly more to the left than it was in June. This is obviously not a good thing. The nurse practitioner stated that Emmie would need to meet with her orthopedic doctor for the next check. If the x-ray shows more leaning, then we’ll have to look at a different intervention. We set her next appointment for five months from November.
A week later, Mark and I were talking. We both realize that NF kids have crazy, weird bones that tend to do their own thing. We reflected back to Emmie’s second MRI and how her cervical kyphosis came up but was dismissed and only six months later it went from a “possible positioning” to “severe cervical kyphosis.” We were blindsided and will always wonder if the progression were caught sooner would we have been able to delay the halo even more.
Because of all of that and after consulting our pediatrician, we decided to seek out a second opinion. We’ll be meeting with a doctor at Shriner’s Hospital this month just to make sure we don’t need to be a bit more aggressive in our treatment.
Like I said earlier, NF bones do their own thing and don’t like to follow standard early onset scoliosis protocol (if there is such a thing). We know she’ll need stronger interventions for this part of NF. While we would love to wait as long as possible for those interventions, we know if she needs it now, then so be it. God has shown us over and over again that He is in control of Emmie’s life (well,all of us,but we can see it more clearly with Emmie). We trust Him to lead us and the doctors we are meeting with.
Zoe had a rough month of testing. She took the SAT and PSAT for the first time. We celebrated with our favorite eat out place! I’m so proud of how hard she is working in her first year of high school.
She also got some great blue highlights.
Lulu and Tot welcomed Tobin with lots of sniffs and licks and made sure to cuddle up with me to protect us both.
Silas built Tobin his name in legos!
Emmie loves her bracelets.
Everyone enjoyed visiting Tobin while I recovered.
Emmie took a good nap on daddy during church.
Tobin’s first family outing. All twelve ventured to the library.
S’mores night!
Pumpkin carving
Scary face pancakes at IHOP are free on October 31st. We love free food. Especially when you can play with it.
Taking off.
Petting skeletons.
Sitting in fire trucks.
Ge and Granddaddy were so excited to be able to come down to meet Tobin. October is a super busy month for them!
I think big sister was super excited to meet her baby brother. The other kiddos were pretty smitten!
Grandmere got in some extra cuddles.
Bright eyes. Tobin has tipped the scales to the blue eyes for the majority…so far. We are all still thinking that they’ll be more hazel/green in the end, though.
Aunt Tracy stopped by after an appointment to check on their baby one day.
But also brought the family by to meet Tobin! Her kids were super excited and are getting so ready to meet their new baby brother or sister.
Dr. B, our friend and chiropractor, came by to give Tobin some loving but also to help us get him to wake up to eat (he liked his sleep the first 48 hours).
Our wonderful Dr. J who has delivered all nine of our babies! 
There are very few things as relaxing as cuddling with a newborn.
Tobin Asher
Some school days are normal…and then there are days when I teach a camo boxing clown!
Some days Emmie just needs to nap in a chair with a book about Star Wars.
As I mentioned earlier, Zoe is taking a Greek class. These are her study notes. Posted on my kitchen wall. And her collection is growing. I think it’s pretty cool that she figured out a good way to study!
These two boys were less than excited a year ago when we moved them into a room together. However, this is their nightly bedtime routine now. They read together until lights out.
Mark ventured out with Ceili Rain to see a ballet production of Beauty and the Beast. It was a last minute date night but definitely worth it. She had a wonderful time and even Mark said the ballet was amazing.
I have wanted to do an escape room group date with friends for a long time. We grabbed up a groupon for one and let it sit for several months before we realized it was going to expire around the time Tobin was going to be born. So we made plans to go and grabbed up some friends. We had space for two more and a walk in couple joined our group too. It was definitely fun! We escaped with six minutes to spare and a little help from the referee/overseer/whatever. I can’t wait to go again.
There is one thing I have craved this whole pregnancy…ice cream cones. This one…did not meet my expectations, but it was still good.
Emmie was so excited about the walk that she woke up at 2:30 the morning of, started to get dressed and cried that she was ready to go to the walk when Mark put her back to bed.
Ceili Rain continued working on her cake decorating badge by helping with the cake and cupcakes.
Ignore my big ol’ pregnancy belly and notice the cool bad/good guys in the background. These guys were part of the 501st Legion-Georgia Garrison and volunteered their time to dress up in this hot costumes and make all of our kiddos super happy! They were amazing and we were so excited to have them come…some of them drove up from three hours away to spend the day with us.
As you can tell, she was only a little excited about this class.
We did food prep.
