July Catch-up
Where did the month go? Well I spent most of July realising that things had all piled up a bit too much and I came down with shingles 
At first I thought I just had a heat rash as I never realised shingles could just be a small patch on your side, I thought they went all the way around your body. After it didn’t ease off I saw the doctor and had it confirmed as shingles. At one point it felt like I’d well and truely burnt my side. It hurt a lot at times, but thankfully paracetamol kept most of the pain away. Thankfully Thomas didn’t catch chicken pox from me, despite everyone saying that surely it would be good if he got it now (no, not with the amount of pain he’s going through with his teeth!). About 3-4 years old would be a bit better I think.
The day after I finished antibiotics for a possible infection on the shingles (due to me scratching) I came down with a possible chest infection so moved onto another lot of antibiotics. With that plus having to keep Thomas away from other babies for a few weeks meant we didn’t really go out much in July except for David taking Thomas out in his pushchair whilst I just caught up on clearing up, a bit of cooking and reading at home. I got my head back into web developing with refreshing my main blog (StuffBySarah) and also upgrading the plugins that I wrote. I’ve had a lot of fun with it and realised how much I’d missed just playing with code.
We’ve also had a new appointment through to finish off the process of getting Thomas’s tongue tie cut as there’s still a bit to go. So a week tomorrow we’re off to Manchester children’s hospital to see a specialist who can do the division on infants up to 16 months old, as the lady in Chester could only go up to 6 months. I’m hoping that this’ll be it. Thomas’s feeding has improved a great deal but part of me still thinks, or at least hopes, that this last bit will simply help further. He’s a lot more settled during the day but he’s still not sleeping very well, and is very restless from about 4am onwards. He’s possibly just fallen into bad habits now, but we’re working on a variety of methods to help improve his sleep.
However, sleep aside, he’s doing extremely well. He’s happily clapping at everything, sitting up quite well with just the occasional fall backwards, and reverse crawling extremely well. He’s very very close to going forwards, and can manage one ‘step’ but then he starts pushing too much with his hands and goes backwards again. That said, he is quite mobile and quick at getting around so we’re in need of moving everything out of his reach before we find the DVDs across the floor, and books out and ripped open! 
The restless from 4am thing is fairly normal (sorry!
) I remember Isabel would want to get up at that time and no amount of persuasion would change her mind. It coincided with her learning to crawl and popping teeth – according to some the changes in the brain that coincide with developmental leaps do cause wakefulness. Who knows if that’s true, but it helped to remember it (even if it was just a ‘placebo’) when we were going through it 
Wish I’d known the Manchester guy (assuming guy – I think you may have seen the same person a friend of a friend of mine went to see) did snips up to 16 months. Could have got Isabel looked at when we first started having significant pain problems ~13-14months.
He’s teething badly at the moment and we’re still waiting for the first to pop through and on the verge of realising he can crawl forward (he’s done it, but don’t think he realised what he did!), although his backwards style is ace
Yeah it’s a shame you didn’t get things sorted. This guy (Patrick I think) was really good. Took him under a minute to check and snip. He also knew what a lip tie was and yes, Thomas has an upper lip tie, but it doesn’t seem to have caused any problems so far and whilst he could cut it, he isn’t keen to usually.
Keep it in mind for no 2! The woman at Chester just told us to call her direct once we had another!