Unanticipated Morning Outing

I finally gave up yesterday afternoon and called Patrick's doctor. We were quickly given an appointment for this morning. Funny, I spent the time between the call and the appointment worrying more about whether it was going to be a wasted appointment than how sick Patrick might be. I finally decided that if I was worried enough about Patrick to call the doctor, then it was worth going, even if it didn't turn out to be anything serious.

It turns out that he isn't sick--not technically. He doesn't have an ear infection or a stomach bug, something the doctor could have prescribed medicine for to get Patrick back to his old self in no time. It sounds like instead his reflux is getting worse and worse instead of getting better as it should be about now. There's not a lot we can do about that. We're now giving him his reflux medicine more often and feeding him more solids than breastmilk to help keep everything down. It's not anything to fix the problem, just hopefully to get it under control. If these tactics don't work, then we'll be going to see a specialist, a gastroenterologist this time. I dread having to take him to a specialist so much that I am praying these ideas work. I don't want there to be anything seriously wrong with Patrick.

On a lighter note, I took Papa's suggestion from a few days ago and attempted to part Patrick's hair on the other side yesterday. After ten minutes of careful combing, this is the best I could do:
It's still pretty cute, but I figured out why his hair had always parted the other direction before. There's a spot on the back of his head from which all his hair swirls in a clockwise direction. None of the hair on his head wants to be combed against that flow. I give up. It can stay in its typical church hair combover and flap like a wing on bad hair days. He's cute no matter what his hair does anyway.
I don't think he was swatting a fly, no matter what it looks like. By the way, the choice of the tie-dyed shirt yesterday was quite deliberate. I decided that as it already looks kind of like a rainbow puked all over it, it was perfect for disguising any color of Patrick's spit-up, no matter what garishly colored food I fed him for lunch. It worked, didn't it? Can you find the spit-up?
I was talking to my mom during the photo shoot. Here is a picture of Patrick "talking" to Nana for a minute too. I hate that the picture is blurry, but you can still tell he was having fun. (Actually I think he's more fascinated by the phone itself, but we can pretend he was that happy to hear Nana's voice. He does react to the sound over the phone, for sure. Just look at that smile!)