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Wordless Wednesday Post

Not really. Wanted to pop in to say that Aerin and I must have caught something at the ENT specialist's office (there were a lot of sniffly kids in the waiting room). We're starting to feel better now, but BOY am I looking forward to having a healthy family again! The picture above was taken a couple of weeks ago before all this drama. J's friend from Hong Kong sent us a package which included these skirt-sets for the girls. I really should buy them more matching outfits — just how cute do they look?...

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Two Counts of Medical Drama, Act Two

I brought Aerin to see an ENT specialist on Friday morning, just before I headed over to my parents'. And what the doctor found wasn't too pretty. First, he found some obstruction (a combination of dead skin cells and earwax) deep inside her ear canal. He was able to remove it with a special instrument, and holy cow did he take out A LOT of gunk! I couldn't believe all that stuff came out of her little ears. After the removal, he was able to take a better look and saw that she had fluid in both ears. Otherwise known as "otitis media with effusion" (OME), this buildup of fluid in the middle ear usually goes away on its own, but in...

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Two Counts of Medical Drama, Act One

On Thursday afternoon, I saw that I had two missed calls: one from my mother, and one from my father. Both within a few minutes of each other. I had a feeling of foreboding, and my suspicions were confirmed when my father told me that my mother was in the hospital. She had been diagnosed with appendicitis, and was scheduled for surgery. Having been through an "appy" myself (when I was six months pregnant...

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An Update on Aerin

Yesterday, we had our final meeting with the Early Intervention (EI) evaluation and placement team. They recommended that Aerin meet with a developmental interventionist twice a week, and a speech therapist twice a month. I became rather upset after this meeting. Not because they were saying Aerin is delayed and needs therapy (I have accepted this after the first meeting), but because their evaluation seemed inaccurate after further examination. When I looked over the initial evaluation carefully (I hadn't seen the scores they had assigned for each skill, and didn't receive a copy of the full evaluation until last week), I noticed that they had scored Aerin lower than they should have. Now, I'm sure some of you are wondering if I'm...

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How I Fixed My Netflix Streaming Problems Using OpenDNS

Starting a couple of weeks ago, I began to run into Netflix streaming issues. Movies would take forever to load, and when they finally did, they would start lagging after just a few minutes. I then realized that this only happened between the hours of 9pm-11pm. I knew that there weren't any programs or processes running on our end that may contribute to this issue. And as someone who doesn't have cable, regularly using Netflix to unwind at the end of a long day, I got pretty annoyed. I began to suspect that either our ISP or Netflix itself was throttling our connection. After all, we, as a family, use the web extensively and always have multiple devices connected at a time. Additionally,...

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When Bloggers Can’t Win

A recent commenter asked me, "If you are so confident in what you have written, why are you responding to each critical comment?" The post in question was a controversial one with numerous commenters up in arms about what I had chosen to share. I considered my options. If I respond, people like her would think that I'm being defensive. If I don't respond, someone will inevitably chime up and say that I'm acting high-and-mighty by ignoring helpful statements. It was, as the title of this post suggests, a no-win situation. That was one example. Here's another. (image source) Last year, I sought to implement a blogging schedule. One of the topics I regularly wrote about was my faith. And it's funny, because I never, in...

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