Landon and his crazy family

I know this is a little late, but here is a picture from Halloween this year. I think that this will be Landon's favorite holiday when he gets older. He doesn't mind being scared...he actually thinks it's funny. :)

Landon dressed up as Frankenstein this year, and I took him around the neighborhood to get the experience. I really don't think he understood what we were doing, but he didn't make a peep. I think he will enjoy it a little more next year. Braydon already has plans to make him into a robot or something crazy like that. Gotta love my husband. :)

We hope that everyone's turkey day was delicious and you got to spend it with the people you love. My mom and step-dad came to visit us this year, and it was so nice to have them here. Landon took a little while to get used to them, but he eventually warmed up to them.

Landon has been doing really well. We've been going to see a doctor in Denver (who was recommended to us by Landon's ENT doctor) named Dr. Wayne Yakes who specializes in lymphangioma and hemangioma. He calls them "vascular malformations" which is a medical way of saying bad veins. He says that Landon's condition was caused in utero when Landon was developing. It's basically where the first veins that we have as an embryo aren't absorbed into the body when it transforms into circulatory system. When these primitive veins aren't absorbed into the body, they turn into the redness that you see on his lip and the little bruise shape on his lower right cheek. Some can be buried further in the skin like the ones in his left cheek. They can form on different parts of the body, the legs, arms, torso, but Landon's just happened to form around his neck and cheek. Lucky us, I know. :)

Anyways, so Dr. Yakes has been seeing Landon the past few months and is doing a procedure on him where he basically injects these bad veins with alcohol, which is shrinking the veins and making them permanently disappear. The past two procedures we've done have been focused on his tongue. Since it's so large, his ear, nose and throat doctor wanted to focus on that first, so that Landon will be able to eat and speak more efficiently. Since then, we have found that it has made a dramatic improvement in the size of his tongue. He's able to stick his tongue out more than he used to and is able to move food around in his mouth. It's been a remarkable change. We can do this procedure every 4 to 6 weeks, and hope to get out there again before the winter weather really sets in. We'll see...

Landon has also recently started seeing a occupational therapist at Children's Hospital here in Omaha to work on trying to have him learn how to suck and swallow. He never really had the chance to learn that as a baby, so we're playing a game of catch up in that department. We've been introducing different cups, some with straws and some without. The OT wants to move him up to cups as soon as we can because she thinks it will be easier for him to be more efficient. My end goal for Landon is obviously to get him to where he gets all of his nutrition through eating and drinking orally. After he is doing that we can talk about getting his G-button taken out. That probably won't be for a little while though, but I would rather start with that process now rather than later.

That sums up what is going on in our world. Feel free to ask questions if need be. I know I can sound a little confusing. My thought processes aren't what they used to be......:)