All about Ali

Some of you have met my sister Alison. Some of you may even be related to her. This post is for her.

(She's in the middle)

Alison was born on April 17th 1988. She's 21 right now and is 5 years younger than me. I don't really remember her being born, or being a baby, but I remember we used to play with Barbies and our dolls house a lot when she was older. Here's a fun fact about Ali... none of my barbies could ever wear shoes. Why? Not because we lost them, but because Ali chewed all of their feet off.

Despite this, I loved having a little sister. I also have two brothers, and we needed to present a united front to keep them in check. She was also useful in that she'd run to the shop next door and buy me twixes. In that way having a little sister was way more useful than having a husband because she was much more willing to run to the shop for me :-)

Ali has always been brave. She decided that she wanted to do something exciting before starting university and went to Argentina to teach english for a few months. She had all kinds of adventures there, including losing a shoe on a bus and having to hop around when she reached her destination until she found a shoe shop.

And you'd have to be brave to leave the house looking like this...

She's also kind and generous. She is a great Auntie. She works very hard and is very clever. In a few years she will be a doctor.

As part of her journey towards becoming a doctor Alison is going to Nepal. She's going in April with H.E.L.P. Scotland Society, an Aberdeen University organization. While they are there they will be working with PSD Nepal helping in rural healthcare centers. In the time before she leaves, she has also been working with a team to raise money for two rural health camps which will provide healthcare to those who currently have absolutely no access to healthcare.

(This is a school) (picture source)

One of the requirements Ali needs to meet before going is to raise a certain amount of money to donate to these health camps, and THAT is why I am telling you all about this. If you'd like to make a contribution to help provide health care to people in Nepal you can do so through paypal using Ali's email address: alison.a.law.06 (at) aberdeen.ac.uk (replace the word "at" with @ to email her, I wrote it like that to try to cut down on spam to her).

If you send her something, thank you for your generosity! Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed this blog all about my little sister.

Yep, I guess they'll let anyone be a doctor these days ;-)

Adele - 2 months old!

Adele is 2 months old now and had her 2 month checkup and shots on Wednesday. It's kind of strange for your baby to have her 2 month appointment almost a week before she was due to be born! Adele is doing really well. She's 6lbs 15oz now, so she gained about 14oz in the last two and a half weeks which is great! She's still in the 0 percentile for a 2 month old, but we're going to start comparing her to a newborn now in terms of growth and development, so in that she's clearly well ahead of the curve ;-)

She's getting better at eating but still has a tendency to choke and turn blue. Between this and setting off her monitor alarm a few times when she had the cold the doctor in the apnea program would like to keep her on the monitor for a few more weeks.

She had her follow up eye exam today and everything looks great! Preemies are at risk for vision problems, and she might need glasses in the future (partly because I wear them) but her nerves are all there now and grew in properly after she was born (which is something that usually happens before birth).

Fiona has been enjoying spending time with her. The other day we all lay (laid? lied?) down on the floor together and she thought it was really funny to scoot up close to her and look at her. She loves to point out Adele's nose and hair, and I thought she was telling me about her elbow, but after she poked her in the face I realized she was saying "eyeball". Adele has started to like to look around too...

We're enjoying the little sleep we manage to get, and are loving spending time all together. Life is fun with two little girls!