Ketones and Milestones

Christian has been doing a lot of this lately...

We officially started the Ketogenic diet on Monday, December 6th at 100% strength.

When weaning him off his elemental formula I felt like I was weaning him from breastfeeding or from bottle to sippy cup. Even though we don't have "normal" milestones like those, we still have moments when we realize our babies are growing up.

Take, for example, Christian's purple Passy Muir Valve. Yes, I still have it. I keep it because it's part of his babyhood and when I see it, it's like finding an old pacifier or baby sock. I get nostalgic. Weird, huh? So I keep it in it's little purple case along with the cap that helped him learn to breath strong.

So weaning him off his elemental formula to a new formula made me feel like he was growing up and on to new things. Milestones.

And, like I said, there's been a lot of sleeping going on around here. That was to be expected, though. A few weeks of lethargy and sleepiness is normal and Christian is doing exactly that...sleeping. But it's not excessive, which is when we should be worried. He wakes and plays with his tangle toys and still bats at his space blanket. We haven't seen any differences in his seizures yet. It sucks to have to keep track of them and mark them down. I'm hoping soon I won't be writing anything down but "zero."

Regarding Ketosis, we test for ketones through urine twice daily, once at night and once in the morning. He had a large amount of ketones fairly quickly and we test using test sticks. I put cotton balls in his diaper and wait. When he pees, I use an inverted plastic baggy to grab the cotton balls, I turn the baggy right side in with the soaked cotton balls inside, squeeze from the outside, and dip the ketone strip for 15 seconds.

Before urine dip:

After urine dip, resulting in large ketones:

(We want large ketones!)

As you can see on the bottle, there is a color chart that tells us Christian is in ketosis.

Other than a lot of hanging around at home, we've been gearing up for little sister's birthday this weekend and Christmas is right around the corner! I've barely done any Christmas shopping. Don't tell Christian, but I have a call into Santa to bring him a big, new therapy ball. He's grown out of his other one - another "baby" item gone by the wayside. Sniff, sniff.



 

While catching Christian in mid yawn, I wanted to show off the Christmas tree in the background. I'm not used to half a tree but, honestly, it would be another full time job keeping Lola away from that tree. She is like a moth to a flame so we had to get a smaller tree, cut it even more, and put it up out of reach so Miss Lola can't get any of the ornaments, or the tree needles, or the water underneath, or...you get the picture. And I haven't decided on a tree topper yet, so for now, there isn't one. I did find gumdrops, though, and I've always wanted to string gumdrops around a tree so there's my next project!

Off to dream about gumdrops and ketones...