About halfway to the top of Pikes Peak
Four years young!
Having some fun with The Lady Bug Game
Braiding her hair
Story time before bed with Mimmy
Playing songs from her beginner book
Setting up her muffin and candle at her birthday. We claimed a spot early on Saturday at the Julie Penrose fountain. It's at America the Beautiful Park and at 10am, it turns into a water park! The water falls from the sprayers at the top of the loop and the water winds down around the base and into a reflection pool. It's very shallow and a lot of fun!
On Sunday we took Mimmy up to Pikes Peak. I forgot about the winding mountain roads, so it was white knuckles for all of us!
Having a famous high altitude doughnut
We also celebrated Mia's official birthday at home. Grandma Dollman had sent a few Tinkerbell items ahead to decorate with.
Chris and Angie gave her a rolling carry on for our trip to Virginia in December! The little pig can come out of his harness and you can fill him with sundries through a little zipper in his back.
She got a full cowgirl outfit, complete with more pink boots!
Grandma Dollman's "monies!"
The card "from" daddy
Mimmy and her cowgirl
All of the cards...that we could find!
A cow in downtown COS
Taking Mia to preschool
We had such a wonderful time and feel like it ended too soon. We dropped mom off at the airport and shared a soda with her before driving up to Denver to meet with the pediatric rheumatologist. He felt that there was nothing much that suggested anything autoimmune other than her ANA workup. He did run a few tests when I told him about the blisters that she will develop on her knuckles.
We saw the immunology doctors again and they had some interesting news. A few weeks ago we had a consult with them and they collected blood and swabs to run through genetic testing. The testing was of no charge to anyone because they aren't necessarily commercially available, but more along the lines of pet projects that National Jewish is working on to one day make them available. One of the cheek swabs came back positive for Fillagrin, so named for the protein in your skin that helps the skin barrier keep allergens and other unwanted things out. Apparently she is deficient in this protein which is why her eczema was so severe and is so easily exacerbated. There is no cure for it, just the maintenance that we've been doing. It is mostly helpful with the big picture, knowing that kids that have this gene mutation do not outgrow the eczema as quickly as non Fillagrin would, if they ever do. Basically we have to continue to be proactive against flare-ups and infections. Piece of cake. The downside of the gene mutation is that it means that the likelihood of other mutations being present is higher, and they have collected more blood for more genetic testing. The things they want to test for are usually male specific, but there have been mutations that allow females to acquire the diseases as well. Ultimately we're looking for T-cell disorders.
Mia is loving her classes at Patriot Elementary's preschool program. They are slightly more academic than Ruth Washburn which is just fine. It's still a play-based curriculum and they paint and draw every day. I'm glad I learned the clothing lesson last year at RWCNS, because now I'm smart enough to put her in clothing that can come back looking like Jackson Pollock designed them. Right now she is the only girl in the class which worried the teacher at first. She was afraid that Mia would be upset, but I assured her that she probably wouldn't notice and I was right! I think she's just gleeful at the fact that she gets the pretty dress up area to herself. There might be another little girl coming in the next couple of weeks, hopefully Mia will not be territorial! I don't want her to be one of those girls! She's doing very well with her words and writing. She can write her name on her own, though sometimes it's backwards and upside down. She can identify some words like "boy" and "ball" and "house". There is a great little Eric Carle board book where the pages are split in two. The top half has a word in lower case letters and the bottom half has a picture of a word and spells it with upper case. You have to match the top page word to the correct bottom page picture and word, and I believe that is responsible for this recognition.
Classes are going well for me, too. I started off with three courses, two in classrooms and one online. I had to drop the online course. It was not a good idea for a computer illiterate person to take a computer literacy course online, at home on a computer she barely knows how to navigate. Since my tech support is in Afghanistan and Georgia, my best option was to bow out gracefully before obliterating my GPA. Now I'm taking Math 030 (yes, the lowest math possible. I'm aware of that) and Basic Nutrition for Nurses. The nutrition course is fascinating. When I got home from class this week I went to my pantry and pretty much rid it of anything with dye. It's the same stuff that you use in your printer! The same stuff that colors fabric and carpet! Eeeeeew! This class is going to turn me into one of those obnoxious health nuts. Better than the alternative! In a few weeks an online Psychology course is supposed to start and I hope that my transcripts from UMUC will be entered by then, because I'd like to take that as well. I want to knock out as many of these pre-recs as possible so I can start interviewing for the program by next fall. I'm concerned about what will happen if we have to move again, in the middle of my studies. I have heard that it's hard on kids, it's probably just as hard on the big students!
One thing at a time...
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