Sorry we haven't posted in awhile. I hope you all had good Thanksgivings! We had a great time getting to see my mom and dad's new log cabin and getting to just hang out with family for a few days. Just wanted to make a quick post to give an update on Austin. We took him back to the doctor this past Monday and they decided that we should try a last round of anti biotics only these would be administered via injections.....three of them. One a day for three days. Poor guy had his last shot yesterday (Wednesday). In 10-14 days we will go back to see if this has cleared up his ear infections. If not we will go to an ENT specialist. Also while we were at the doctor's we got a phone number for a pulmonary (sp?) specialist to call and schedule an appt. to check into wheezing. They (not the specialist, just his normal doctor) had chest x-rays taken of Austin and said that there was nothing irregular showing up in the x-rays. Good news but still no closer to figuring out the problem. So we will get an appt with the specialist and go from there.

We are going to take Austin around to some Christmas tree lots to see if he reacts to the trees in order to see if we can get a real Christmas tree or not this year. We are anxious to celebrate Christmas with Austin this year. A quick thanks to Joni for being willing to embroider Austin's name into his new Christmas stocking!

Talk to you all again soon!

(This is basically a cross post of an entry that I made on the other blog I am running HERE. But I thought you guys may want to read it to if you don't check out that other blog.)

Austin has been fighting asthma/allergy problems for a couple months now. He is having to do nebulizer treatments for a second time, this time to last throughout the winter. Because he will be doing these treatments for so long, the doctor had our insurance buy us our own machine versus keeping their's for that long of a period. (very quickly to explain nebulizer treatments for those who don't know. The machine is basically a little electric air pump that has a plastic hose/tube connected to it. At the other end is a reservoir for the medicine and a mask that covers his mouth and nose. The air is forced through and vaporizes the medicine for him to breath in).He has gotten used to it though and is pretty good at sitting still during the treatment. It helps that we play him one of his Baby Einstein dvds during this time too. ;-) They also had him on a certain antibiotic, don't remember the name. Well, while on this antibiotic he developed an ear infection, which the antibiotic was supposed to prevent. So they then switched antibiotics. Well, he wasn't himself this past Sunday and we just thought that he was having a bad day. Then yesterday the daycare called my wife and said that Austin had a 102 degree temp. So Jen left work and took him back to the doctor. Turns out he now has an ear infection in both ears! (beginning to wonder if it is some dastardly plot and the doctor is really giving him infection inducing medicine!!! ;-)) Also his top two front teeth are just about to break through so they feel that the combination of the two is what caused his temperature to spike. So we are now on our third antibiotic. ($50! Is it just me or does it seem to be getting more and more expensive for medicine. I don't remember medicine being this expensive on a consistent basis.) As much as it sounds like it, this is not a woe is me post. It's more that I'm frustrated for him that it seems to be just one thing after another. Poor kid...I hate that he is having to deal with all of this. It's a lot for a 7 month old (breathing stuff started at 5 months) to deal with but he does it like a champ. Probably better than I would if I was having to deal with it all myself. I actually feel very lucky that Austin takes this all in stride as well as he does. Even with the ear infections and the breathing treatments he is still a very happy baby.

His temp was back down to normal this morning so hopefully this means the combination of antibiotic and the baby Tylenol we are giving him are working. I knew his teeth were probably going to be coming in soon since he's been gumming his bottom lip for a few days and drooling like crazy. So we'll have 2 on top and 2 on bottom...no more letting him gum/chew on dad's finger!! heh.

Well the rest of the pictures are up on our website. I changed Austin's 6 month pictures page back to a format where you can save the pictures if you want to. The other page I had up was neat in that you could let it do a slide show for you if you wanted but you couldn't right click on the pictures and save them. Along with the 6 month album are albums for the Fall Festival at Jen's school and Halloween, Austin's Parent/Child dedication, and just some fall pictures as well as Levi's soccer games.

Austin's 6 month pictures will be uploaded to our website later today, as well as just some other pictures taken during the month. To hold you guys over till then, here is a preview of some of the pictures that will be on the site:

**Update** Austin's pics are now up on our site. I still haven't gotten the rest of the pics from the month put up yet but they'll be there sometime this weekend. Click HERE to get to our photos page. You'll notice the page for this month is a different format than what we have used before. Just something I was trying out to see if I like. You can click on each pic to view a bigger sized one or you will also see a button that looks like the play button on a cd player. If you click that it will show the photos in a slideshow without you having to do anything else.

Austin is 7 months old!! Yesterday ;-)

Many of you already know but for those of you that don't, we had to put Austin back on breathing treatments this past week. His cough had never gone away and then his wheezing came back. The doctor thinks that it is asthma/allergy related. So back to using the nebulizer. We had been having to do 6 treatments a day. We are down to 5. Two different medications. One gradually decreases and the other we will have to give him all winter. So soon it will just be two a day. We also had to give him an oral steroid to help treat the asthma and also an antibiotic. The other day he began pulling on his left ear a lot so we took him back to the doctor and found out he had an ear infection......but in the right ear. The kid is already dyslexic...j/k. The antibiotic that he was on was supposed to keep that from happening so they took him off that antibiotic and have given him a different one. Even through all of this though he has stayed a happy baby. Still smiles and talks a lot so that's good. We will be getting his six month pictures posted on our website soon and will post here when they are ready.