A year in the life on Lani

A year in the life of Lani – how her Downs Syndrome has been working out.

Well it’s been a year since my last blog and my little baby girl is now a little toddler (boo hoo she’s not a baby anymore…. Sad face),  Lani has changed so much its tuff to know where to start.

Just as my last blog was finishing Lani was going for tests for epilepsy, we went into hospital and they attached some wires to her head and monitored her. The results came back quickly and were negative which was such good news, all of our family and friends had a sigh of relief. So why was she having such strange turns?? Well she still does and its mostly when she is eating so it could be sensory / reflux not too sure or it may be that sometimes kids (Downs or not) can just act strange.  

Also just after the blog ended it was Lanis birthday on the 7^th November and she turned 1, we decided not to have a party for her but everyone still spoilt her rotten, she is such a lucky little girl having such good supportive family and friends. 

Christmas was soon knocking on our door, Lee and I put up lots of decorations and Lani proofed the Christmas tree from her grabbing hands!! Her crawling was very good by this point and she was pulling to stand using the sofa. 

This pulling to stand soon turned into climbing on to the sofa then climbing up the back of the sofa and sitting on the window sill – we moved the sofa so it backed onto a solid wall!! We worked hard with Lani to teach her to get off the sofa safely but she did once take a dive off and got a carpet burn right on the end of her noise. 

Through all of this time Lani had a cold with a runny nose and her hearing was very low, we tried hearing aids and struggled (I will do a post on this subject), then Lani came down with a cough. Her cough got worse and worse and after too many trips to the doctors she was finally diagnosed with Whooping Cough, also known as the 100 day cough!! Yes 3 months later she was still coughing. Note – Lani has had all of her injections so it’s not that we hadn’t tried to prevent it. This kicked off a spate of illness and during the Whooping cough my poor little baby got Croup and became worrying ill, within weeks of recovering from these elements Lan pop caught Tonsillitis she was so ill the doctor said he had never seen such a bad case come on so quickly, that night her tonsils burst and there was blood all over her cot, I can’t even tell you the worry we went through, stressful didn’t even come close to the mark. As you can imagine we didn’t do much during this time but lots of cuddles and pyjama days.

Through all of this my strong willed little one took her first steps (full story later).

When Lani was better we took 2 family holidays in the sunshine and she managed to recover even from her cold which was a miracle, we then decided to keep her away from nearly all children until the school summer holidays were over to try and reduce the risk of her becoming ill again – it worked she was cold free /illness free for 9 weeks which was a great opportunity for her little body to recover and gain strength.  

Just one week before the summer holidays finished (3 weeks ago) we moved home as my husband has a new job, we are still in Wiltshire but it feels like a world away from where we were based before (full move story to come later in the month).

Diary

Today I took Lani to a toddlers group and she did some gluing and ran around causing havok, a quick drive in the little tikes car and we were off. We left early as I had arranged to meet a  mum form the local area who has a son with DS, getting local connections is so important to me. We did meet up and she was lovely as well as her son and daughter, a really nice happy family. This afternoon Lee is home so were off to do some food shopping while I have a nice stew in the slow cooker for tea.