Ben's first steps and reflux update

This post is almost 2 months overdue.....poor 2nd born baby boy.

While the deployment was counting down, Ben was learning to walk. 

Here is his "first steps" video taken May 6th on his 13 month birthday:


His progress in learning to walk was slowed by an ear infection treated with amoxicillin.  The ear infection became a double ear infection and was then treated with some awful antibiotic that caused him to have severe GI distress.  At the end of May, he STILL had fluid in his ears, but the infection was gone.  As a 3rd measure, the pediatrician gave a prescription for allergy medicine.

Literally, overnight he went from taking a couple steps to this:


The 2nd video was taken about 5 weeks after the first, but he didn't progress with his walking until just a week before that video was taken.

In other news, Ben's reflux medicine was stopped in early June.  He hasn't slept past 5:30am since and now doesn't fall asleep until 9pm or so at night.  He wakes before 5am about 2 times a week.  By mid-June, he was back to crying 3 to 4  hours a day, so we called his GI specialist who put him on Zantac (the medicine he was on last summer that didn't work).  Two weeks into it and the sleep hasn't improved and his crying is down to 2 to 3 hours a day.....and is spitting up once or twice everyday......sigh.

Edited to add:  Just talked with his ped GI and Ben will go back on Prilosec.  Let's hope it continues to help as much as it did before he stopped.

First steps

Liam began army crawling at 8 months, pulling up at 9 months, hands and knees crawling at 10 months, cruising at 11 months, but has been hesitent to take that plunge into independent walking. He took his very first steps by himself on October 15th at Kindermusik class, but showed no interest in repeating it. Then this weekend, he decided to finally show Daddy he could walk, so that Daddy could see before he left for a two week trip to Germany. Here are two videos are our big boy officially "toddling."

The second video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_zYPK6vGo