Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

This is the before

The whole group

Vince was very excited about his wagon

This is the after

Vince really enjoyed playing with his uncles

Being that all of the people in Vince's life wear glasses to some extent he really liked them. Papa always give Vince his, so for Christmas he decided to buy Vince a pair of his own.

We hope everyone had a great Christmas! We did! We decided that we would host Christmas so we had both sets of parents and our brothers down at our house. It went really well, we did watch Christmas Vacation and luckily ours turned out nothing like theirs! I think Vince had the best time out of all of us. Here are some pictures of our weekend.

Love,

Nick, Andrea, and Vince

Halloween and other stuff

Vince really loves John Deer (thanks Grandma and Aunt Mary)

I will put more pictures of Vince in his costume later, but our computer is running slow tonight

It is way past Halloween, but I will post Vince in his costume anyways. He was a very cute tiger for Halloween this year and he got to go trick or treating for the first time. He was very unsure of going up to peoples houses to get candy, but he really liked the candy when we got home. We also had a Urology appointment on Halloween. We all went to that being you never know what kind of news you are going to get there and it was all pretty good. His kidneys are still looking pretty good on the ultrasound, it does not look like he has any reflux right now. Vince did have a UTI this summer with a fever and the doctor was quite unhappy about that so he would like Vince to have a uro-dynamics and x-ray in March. I know at some point we will most likely be told that it is time to cath, but until that time comes we are going to enjoy not having too. Vince has been doing great walking lately, we are getting really close to independent walking I think. At therapy on Friday Vince did some amazing stuff. Kelly (his amazing therapist) has been able to get Vince to do things no one else ever has. He took (her arms were around him, but not touching him) about 15 steps by himself before he fell over! He also walked in between us and took in between 5-7 steps by himself. Other than that we have been busy as usual. We are really looking forward to having a four day weekend coming up! In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I just wanted to restate how thankful we are to have all of you in our lives and the support you have shown us.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Nick, Andrea, and Vince

Fall Pictures

Here are some of the fall pictures we took a couple of weeks ago. We had a great weather weekend and took advantage of it.

Stroll N Roll

Team D Hats

Leading the pack

Walking with Greyson

A shot of a bunch of the people, there were more than this they just did not all fit in the picture!

Vince had a great time walking

Walking with Daddy

It was very cold

We did the Stroll N Roll today and it was great! The weather was a little iffy but we all had a great time. We had pledged to raise $500.00 and were actually able to raise $610.00. We were very happy about that. Tonight Leigh posted that the amount raised total for the Stroll N Roll was over $20,000.00. That is amazing and is going to do so much good! Thank you to all of you that helped us and supported us. We are very loved and blessed by all of you. Over the last three years, we have been shown how wonderful our friends and family are and it always blows me away. We are so lucky! I am including some pictures from the event.

Love,

Nick, Andrea, and Vince

Cider Mill

There was a neat train at the cider mill. Vince kept calling it "Phomas" because he thought it was Thomas the train.

Walking one handed! He is doing really great lately, we love his new therapist.

He loved his donut, he ate the whole thing

We walked on the hay

We took silly pictures

And Vince's favorite part: The Slide!!

It really felt like fall this weekend and we took advantage of the nice weather by going to a cider mill that is close to our house. Vince got to hang out with two new friends while we were there. This summer one of my co-workers built a house behind ours. One corner of our yards touch. They have two kids, one who is 4 and one who is almost 2. I am pretty sure Vince and Drew will be in the same grade. We are really enjoying having them so close. Other than that we planted flower bulbs and played in the yard. It was a great weekend at home!

We hope everyone is having a wonderful fall!

Love,

Nick, Andrea, and Vince

EEG

Papa and Vince "driving" a tractor

Vince loves to drive, he helps mow the lawn and would love to do it everyday if he could

The day after his seizure. He was having fun taking things out of his diaper bag and eating cheese chips off of the floor. :)

I forgot to put up pictures from when we met the Gibbs family. Here is a picture of Greyson and Vince. You can see how excited they were to meet each other. :)

Tuesday we had an EEG to check Vince's brain activity and it did show that his left frontal lobe has some abnormal activity. This is a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because we know that his seizure was not cause by anything new. A little history on Vince: three weeks after he was born he had a shunt put in and after surgery he had bleeding in his brain which led to a seizure then. After that seizure we were put on phenobarbital but he has been off of that for over a year now. The blood has gone away in his brain, but there are still stains from it and my understanding is that the stains will be there for a very long time if not forever. The stain somehow was activated again and caused the seizure. Kids brains grow a lot in the first three years of life and that is probably what happened with Vince (a growth spurt). The bad is that he now has to be on seizure medicine for at least two years. If he is seizure free in that time then we will be able to think about it. The doctor is hopeful that he will out grow this and we wont have to deal with it in the future. Other than that Vince is doing great, he is cruising furniture and talking a lot!

Love,

Nick, Andrea, and Vince