Odds and Ends

Baby M Update: She has been home from the hospital for four months now, almost as long as she was in the hospital. That will be a great milestone! Unfortunately, she was recently diagnosed with failure to thrive, because her weight gain is still so slow that it's putting her at risk for a number of different problems (fragile bones, developmental delays, dehydration, electrolyte imbalance and other things). So last week we were readmitted to the hospital for a few days to have a temporary feeding tube placed. I'm hoping that a few weeks with a feeding tube will get us to a place where she can take over on her own, but if not, we will be readmitted again for surgery for a more permanent tube. (It's not really permanent-permanent, but would be in place for a couple of years, as opposed to one that goes through her nose to her intestines that will be in place for a few weeks.)

The feeding issues are by far the hardest part of parenting that I've encountered, so I'm hoping that having an alternative way of getting nutrition in her will make our days more enjoyable. And if the pressure's off, we can make mealtimes less stressful and hopefully she will no longer fight the bottle.

Other odds and ends:

* We have finally signed up for a health savings account through Peanut's work. While all of Baby M's healthcare costs have been covered by insurance, dental work and 20% of medical costs for Peanut and me are out of pocket. I'll submit the first claim this week.

* I have been getting better at this whole stay-at-home-mom thing, at least in regards to keeping up with laundry and getting dinner on the table when Peanut gets home from work. Sometimes I look at my days and wonder what on earth I did all day, but Baby M is getting more content to watch me do some work instead of needing to be held all the time.

* We haven't made pizza in a long time, but I love The Frugal Girl's breakdown of how much it costs to make compared to frozen or takeout pizza. I made egg rolls this week, and meant to do a cost analysis to see how cost effective they were. Unfortunately, they didn't taste that good and were a huge amount of work, so I'm not sure that I would do them again regardless of how much savings they were. But pizza is worth it!