Parker's Posse

Hello, blogging world. Hope you didn't forget about us. We have been pumping about 8 weeks now....whew what a whirlwind!  Ups and Downs, Highs and Lows, Normal Stinking Diabetes. We have vacationed and just enjoyed our summer with our Type I diabetic little man. We also got a new puppy to add to the mayhem. She is very sweet and sensitive to the kids, which is great. Parker has done well with the pump this summer, despite the site falling off every time he swims!  Overall, we love the flexibility of pumping and our A1C reflects good things... 6.7!

We have joined the JDRF to help Find a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes and we are walking for a cure in September.  Join us by following the link below and come join Parker's Posse as a virtual walker or live walker :)

http://www2.jdrf.org/goto/ParkersPosse

And the winner is...... Animas Ping

We decided on the Animas Ping pump for sweet Parker. He needs such small doses that we had to rule out the Omnipod, which I also really liked. He just have had a great customer experience so far with Animas. The pump is set to arrive tomorrow. We can play with it over the weekend and then we go to our pump training class next week at Children's with a Pump Live date of May 31st!!! So exciting that we will be official pumpers in two weeks.

Here is our little man getting ready for his first t-ball game with his handy-dandy side clipped Dexcom Seven to tell us how he is handling the exercise. We have discovered that running crashes Parker's blood sugar like you would not believe. But we are ready with carb loaded snacks and drinks on the side lines.

I can't thank you D-Moms enough for the advice and support. I actually met a sweet family at dinner the other night with a T-1 daughter. I hope she joins the blogging world soon so she can get some much needed support. She and I both felt like we weren't getting the support we longed for from the diabetes educators and doctors at the endo-clinic but I told her how great you moms and dads have been.

It is so nice to have the love and support from strangers that feel like family!

Pump Time.... Need Advice!

We made it through surgery to remove the lipoma from Parker's left side. He is doing really well and recovering a little too fast for me. I am trying to keep him down and resting but he is fighting me to get up and go! Yesterday we went to Pump It Up class at Children's Medical Center so that we can get the ball rolling towards getting a pump. We have it narrowed down to the Animas or Medtronic pumps because the Omnipod doesn't do small enough dosing for my little man. We love the Omnipod but need a basal rate of .025 so we can't use it. Bummer! We are pretty darn sure we are going to get the Animas but I wanted to hear from the DOC and hear what you pumpers like about your pumps.

Surgery number three

Sweet Parker has surgery number three tomorrow. Three surgeries in barely five years of life. Tomorrow we will hopefully have an uneventful and quick surgery to remove a large fatty tumor on his left hip. They will biopsy it but we have been assured that these are benign 99% of the time! Please pray that our Diabetes doesn't cause any craziness tomorrow since he will go without food for quite a while. Everything seems a little scarier with diabetes.

My mother taught me that it was not polite to stare....

....so why is it the rest of the world seems to have missed this lesson in etiquette? My least favorite thing since diagnosis is eating in a restaurant because it is so difficult to calculate carbs and also because I don't know how to handle the stares from everyone around when I poke my little man's fingers or give him a shot. We try to be discrete but I refuse to do it in the dirty public bathrooms. I feel like everyone is judging what I give my kid to eat because they don't understand type 1 diabetes or they wonder what we did to cause this? Paranoid, I know!

Awesome New Video

My wonderful husband created the most amazing video to show that Diabetes has not slowed Parker down. This video is a tribute to my amazing boy who never sweats the small stuff! Diabetes kicks my butt some days but how can I complain when his spirit shines sooooo bright. This video is also a tribute to all of those who have given us support and prayers.

It is long, but well worth it in the end. Pause the music on the bottom of my page, so you can hear the music in the video.

Sorry it is a link.....YouTube wouldn't publish it because it has music in it. But the music makes the video.

http://gallery.me.com/jared.anderson#100161

Love/Hate relationship with Dexter

I am having a serious love/hate relationship with our new Dexcom that we have been using for 3 weeks now. We get good numbers sometimes. Sometimes we get good arrows telling us when he is rising or crashing. But the rest of the time I am getting woken up at 2 am with beeps for crazy "imaginary" low blood sugars or beeps in the daytime for lows/highs that aren't there. Sometimes I get ???, no arrow at all or LOW despite normal sugars.  I try to recalibrate, I try to change the sensor, I try to call tech support (very sweet people BTW), but at the end of it all I just want to throw the stupid thing in the toilet and get a new one. So far this Dexcom, AKA Dexter by Parker, is just driving me crazy and prompting me to poke his sweet little finger way more ofter to than I should have to in order to get Dexter recalibrated. Super frustrating!

Any tips?