Things are chugging along here.  The school year is winding down, the days are warmer and we've spent a good bit of time in the pool in the last few weeks.

I took this cute picture on May 11th:

of Owen eating snack with his classmate at school. You can see that he has graduated to the big boy chair and can now eat from a plate.  In the past Owen has considered a plate to simply be a tool that allowed him to dump more food onto the floor in one motion than his hands alone could accomplish. We are getting closer to civilization - now if only we could get him to figure out what a spoon is for.

May 22nd was the open house at our local rescue squad. We decided to bring Owen down so that the EMT's could see him when he was actually concious and breathing all by his little self.  They were giving tours of the ambulances, but we felt that perhaps we had seen enough of the inside of this one already and just took a picture of it:

The best part was Owen snuggling with Angel and Melissa, the two EMT's that have responded most often to Owen's little incidents:

These guys do all of their work on a volunteer basis and we can't thank them enough for all their hard work!

Let's see, what else has been happening?  Well, we have been having some success with our quest to find effective seizure meds.  He has been having a seizure every two weeks almost like clockwork for a while now.  Each time we up the meds, and each time the seizures get less severe.  Last Sunday he had one that we almost didn't notice.  I went upstairs in the morning and he coughed a bit and threw up just a little - which considering he had a cold wasn't all that surprising.  He seemed fine but when he tried to drink he had a real hard time getting it to his mouth and he had trouble standing up - he was just uncoordinated for an hour or so and then he was fine.  No convulsions, no breathing problems, no long nap - much better than the previous ones had been. 

Our biggest issue with the meds right now is that while they seem to be making the seizures less severe - which is great - they are also keeping him awake for hours at night and then he's tired and cranky and aggressive the next morning.  We had an appointment with the neurologist today and he thought that since the meds were working on the seizures that we should try to keep them.  Since we do need to get him sleeping at night however, he did suggest that we try giving him a dose of Melatonin before bed.  Melatonin works with your body to tell it that it is time to go to sleep in a natural way.  He prefers this to sleeping pills that can interact with the other meds and cause other issues.  We tried it tonight and he was asleep by 8:15, which is much better than the 10:00 or later that he had been doing since we upped his Zonegran a few weeks ago.  Now we just have to see if he sleeps through the night.

The Swing
Back in March I posted this picture on our family blog:

This is Owen in his Fisher Price Aquarium Take-Along Swing.  It was his favorite thing in the whole wide world to do.  He would crawl across the whole house to get to it.  I highly recommend this swing for infants, it folds up to a tiny package, when you pull the fishies on the sides it plays music and lights us, there are floating fishies in the side panels, it cradles them in a way that supports big heads and there is even a fishy on the strap to play with:

I would not, however, recommend this for your three and a half year old.  Sadly, the plastic arms cracked a few weeks ago.  While I give Fisher Price credit for it holding up for so long, and for it failing in a way that Owen didn't even really notice let alone get hurt by, it was clear that it was time to replace the beloved swing.  So, I headed out to the workshop to make him a bigger swing that could support a growing boy.  And here it is:

This is a still shot of Owen clapping when I put him in it!  My apologies for the mess visible around the swing, I was so excited to try him out in it that I didn't clean up the construction mess first. 

I kept the old seat cushion complete with fishy on the seat belt:

And here he is checking out the floating fishies that I embedded in the supports:

A side view:

And his sister enjoying swinging him with some of the rope that was leftover from stringing on the canvas:

I still have to mount the light/sound bar to finalize the effect, but when I tried to take him out of the swing he held on to it and didn't want to leave so I think that it will be a hit. There is plenty of room for him to get taller so he should get a few years of use out of it.

I will leave you with a few pictures of Owen and his sister in their pajamas the other night: