Balch Family Blog

We just returned from Tucson. I went down and took the boys along. I had a conference on Aspergers and High Functioning Autism. My mom watched the boys while I went. It worked out quite well. Next week we are off to Las Vegas to celebrate Andrea’s Wedding. It should be a lot of fun.

I am in the process of registering Camden for Preschool. He will actually attend the special needs preschool where I used to work and her will be a Peer Pal. I will be going to work 2 days a week next school year. I am excited about it. I think it will be the perfect balance of working and staying home. I get employee preference which is nice, so I picked his class and teacher! Camden starts a sports class in June that will teach him the basics of soccer, t-ball, and basketball.
Carsten is learning new things everyday. He is cruising around furniture and getting into everything. Nothing is safe! He is picking up new signs as I teach them to him, his latest include “cookie” and “pacie”. He is quite quick! This morning he used signs to ask for his milk. This was the first completely unprompted request he has made with signs! He also broke his first REAL tooth. The nub that poked through at 6 months never did anything else. This one is through and you can see and feel it!

Mark is still working hard. He is looking forward to getting away for a short time. We also have relatives coming in from England, so our next 3 weeks will be very busy! I will try to write again after the wedding.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

We went to an allergist yesterday for Camden.  I will start from the beginning as it seems I never posted on it.  In March, Camden licked the beaters of his brother’s birthday cake batter.  After that he had hives around his mouth.  I notified his doctor and she had a RAST completed.  That is a blood test to see if you are allergic to something.  Results showed he was severely allergic to eggs (The cut off is <0.35 and Camden results were 36.09).  We were prescribed an EPI-pen and sent off to see an allergist.

Well we got in to see him yesterday.  They completed a skin scratch test and the results were negative.  The doctor was quite surprised that Camden had such a high result on the blood test but no reaction to the skin test or to eggs cooked within foods.  After much discussion, it was determined that for the next 6 months we won’t feed him eggs, but it is fine if it is in something that has been cooked.  I have already figured out that he can never eat the LAFFERTY CHOCOLATE PIE!!!  Oh my!  But if that is the worst of it, no big deal!  We will carry an epi-pen, benadryl, and oral steroid with us wherever he is and just closely watch him around new foods.  After the 6 months we will have everything completed again to see where he is.  The doctor said he should out grow it all by the age of 5 or so.

We had a great day last Sunday. It was very relaxed and enjoyable. We went to church in the morning and then hung out at home until the afternoon. Mark’s parents came over and we had an egg hunt. Mark BBQ’d some chickens and they were quite good!

Here are the boys with their baskets.

The boys after church.

 

I have added pictures into our gallery under Our Boys and Easter 2007.  There are more, but it was a pain to get these in, so you will have to settle with what I got in there.