. . . The Barney Family: Lots of Pictures

After 8 ½ long months we finally updated our blog! Life with 3 kids has been pretty busy for Brad and me so it’s been hard finding the time to add pictures to our blog, but I want to try harder to update it more often! Maybe one of these days I’ll make our blog page look cuter, too. So here are some pictures of our family from June through December 2010. I’ll add some pictures from January and February later.

I also wanted to give an update on Kevin. We have taken Kevin to the GI doctor a good number of times during the past 1 ½ years because of his milk and soy allergies, frequent vomiting (luckily this has stopped), and his poor growth and “failure to thrive”. The reason why he hasn’t been growing well is because he is an extremely small eater and for a while there were a lot of days when he would eat absolutely nothing. For 1 ½ years now he has been drinking a hypoallergenic formula called Elecare (which is very expensive) so he has been doing pretty well at drinking that at least, so that’s what he gets almost all of his calories from. Because of all this, Kevin is very small and for a long time now he has been in the 5^th percentile for height and way below the 5^th percentile for weight, so we of course really want him to grow! He will turn 3 years old in May and right now he weighs 24 ½ pounds.

In September Kevin’s GI doctor recommended that some procedures be done on Kevin to see if he had any other problems. I really didn’t think Kevin’s lack of eating had to do with any physical problems but I decided to go ahead and let them to these procedures which they did in October. First they had to sedate Kevin and then they put a probe in that went up his nose, down his throat, and into his stomach, etc., to get pictures of his insides and some tissue samples. The results they found from this procedure were that he has inflammation in his small intestine, which the doctor said is probably because of an allergic reaction. So even though they found inflammation it didn’t really tell us anything new; just that he must still have his allergies.

The other procedure they did was to test for things like reflux so they once again put a probe up his nose and down into his stomach. This probe had to stay in him for 24 hours so we took him home like this and we had to record everything that he ate and drank during that time. In case Kevin would try to grab at the probe and pull it out, they gave us these things that wrapped around his arms and they had a stiff board inside that went against his elbows so he couldn’t bend his elbows, and therefore, he couldn’t grab at the probe. They kind of looked like casts so it looked like he broke his arms or something. (I put a couple pictures of this on our blog.) Anyway, we were afraid that during these 24 hours Kevin would be having a really hard time and that it would be a miserable day, but he actually did quite well and he was such a good sport and so brave. He of course started out pretty sad, but then later on he started to cheer up. He slept just fine that night, too; we were afraid we would be up all night with him but we weren’t. The results of this procedure showed that he didn’t have reflux, which is what I thought, but I had decided to have it done anyway. So all these things that were done on Kevin didn’t really get us anywhere and ended up costing us a ton of money!

As for how Kevin is doing now, he is still a really small eater but he has at least been eating a little better the last couple months and he has also been drinking more Elecare the past while. He has gained some weight during the past couple months so hopefully he will keep that up.

Besides his food allergies and slow growth, Kevin is doing well and he is a sweet little boy with a good sense of humor and he makes us laugh and smile. He is even pretty good at getting little Matthew to laugh by acting silly. He loves to play with cars and other toys, enjoys playing outside, loves to just have fun, and he is a joy in our family.

Tyson and Matthew are both doing quite well, too. Tyson loves to build cool looking towers and other things with his blocks, he has always enjoyed playing with magnet letters and numbers, and he continues to excel at reading and counting. He also likes to write a lot and lately he has been writing little stories. He is a good, smart boy who has impressed us all and he is a wonderful part of our family.

Matthew has been growing so fast and is getting so big! He is a happy little guy who loves to play with anything and everything and he likes balls a lot. He is so darling and such a cutie and we are so glad that he joined our family almost one year ago. As for Matthew’s most recent accomplishment: he is now walking! He took his first few steps about 4 weeks ago, and almost 2 weeks ago is when he really started walking a lot.

Brad and I love our 3 adorable boys so much!!! Being parents definitely isn’t easy and our boys give us many opportunities to practice patience, but we love them!

Matthew, the future missionary! We did pictures like this with the other boys, too, when they were babies. All of them were 9 months old in their missionary pictures.