It's been another busy week and on Tuesday the Speech and Language therapist came to our house to access Brett to see if he is any better with his swallowing.  When she listened to his throat she heard sounds that he was having trouble coordinating his swallowing of saliva with his breathing, so unfortunately Brett has to stay nil by mouth for the present time.  The plan now is that he will be re-assessed in four weeks time, but with solids (pureed veg) rather than milk as it seems he may handle that better.  In the short term we have been given lots of facial excersises to practice with Brett and have also been advised to start signing with him. (yes, this early!) So, the sign we have chosen to start with is 'drink' and we are now making this sign every time he is tube fed.  Luckily Garry and myself when on a six week basic sign language course last year so we have a little bit of a head start.

We have booked a weekend in a caravan in Burnham for next week and we are hoping to go and find a static caravan to buy while we are there.  We are hoping for lots of holidays and weekends at the seaside to benefit Brett and Garry, the sea air should do Bretts lungs the world of good.

Managed to get some 'cot blocks' on Ebay to raise the head of Bretts cot to help his reflux, a bargain at 99p plus postage!  and it saves me stuffing blankets under the mattress to raise it.

Molly and Ruby (Bretts cousins) visit and Brett get's loads of cuddles!

This week Brett has had a hearing test which he passed, and also a hip scan that was absolutely fine too so good news from the hospital appointments side of things.  Mind you we sort of knew his hearing has been ok because you only have to make a slight noise and he wakes up, he could hear a pin drop!   Gary starts a new job in just over a weeks time and having finished his old job yesterday he now has a lovely week at home to spend some quality family time, Garry Jnr breaks up from school today too so I'm looking forward to the next week!

Brett has had a cold for a couple of days and feeding him has been a bit of a struggle.  It has been hard to test the PH before his tube feed and has meant a couple of visits from the community nurse and also a hospital visit and lots of phone calls.  We have had to increase the number of times we are flushing the tube to try to overcome the problem and it seems to have worked so far.  Brett was pretty miserable with his cold yesterday but seems to have perked up a bit today thank goodness!

Look...

No
Tubes!

In between a change of NG tube, we managed to get a picture of Brett (his first one!) WITHOUT any tubes hanging from him!

We also have some pictures of Brett enjoying his new swing - with flashing lights and 15 different tunes to choose from!!