Natalie Update

Several people have been asking about Natalie so I'll just give a little update. She has a routine appointment with the urologist this Friday and I was going to wait and post after that but since people have been asking this is where we are:

The reason you haven't heard much about Natalie's bladder recently is because there hasn't been much to tell and that's good. She hasn't had an infection in over 4 months---woo hoo!! That's really great considering she had been getting about one a month. There have been several times the past few months that she ran a fever and we would test for a UTI but she came back clean. This means that she just had some other normal bug causing the fever. Even if she has symptoms of a cold or something we always have to check for a UTI any time she has a fever.

We still place a catheter every night. no big deal. Before we started cathing I never ever thought I could do that comfortably but it's seriously just another step in the bed time routine. The point of the catheter is to give the bladder a break and make sure everything is draining.

She's also on some preventative antiobiotics that she takes every night. I'm really hoping that at her appointment they will do away with the cathing or the drugs or both.

For now, we just need to keep her infection free and let her bladder grow.

It's been nice to let the whole bladder exstrophy thing take a back seat for a while. It was so consuming those first several months.

Natalie is doing great with all the normal one-year-old stuff. It's fun to see her personality coming out. She's quite the talker and is usually squawking about something. I've realized that I usually have the binky in her mouth at church not because she's fussy but because she makes so much noise just talking and squealing. She can stand by herself for several seconds. She loves to follow her sisters around and I'm sure will very soon be in on their games and fun. She has really taken off on the solid food and usually doesn't like us to spoon feed her. She'd rather pick up her own food and eat it.

She's doing great!