The ENT and Animals in Yellowstone

We took Carter to the ENT on Monday and he had a look see at the tonsils and the ears. The tonsils and adenoids are coming out and the ear tubes are going in. He looked at Carter's tonsils and said that they are really tiny - but they always start with the least evasive thing to fix sleep apnea and move up from there. He also said that typically removal of the tonsils and adenoids will fix sleep apnea in about 30% of the cases with children with down syndrome. We will just keep our fingers crossed that we are one of the 30%......

He also confirmed that there is fluid in both ears and with the failure of two hearing tests he is just going to put the tubes in while Carter is sedated. We are thankful for this and hope it will help his hearing.

Right now we are just waiting for Linda the scheduler to call us back and let us know when surgery is scheduled. She is coordinating the two surgeons to make sure everything can be taken care of in one surgery (skin tags and the tonsils, adenoids and ear tubes). Carter will end up in PICU and will have to stay over at least one night and then from there it will be decided when we can go home.

And now for some pictures from Yellowstone (not all 521!!) I think I will do this in several posts as it will be easier. We saw lots of animals in Yellowstone so we will start with those pictures.

Every morning in our campground in Madison we woke up to the "caw caw" of Ravens - who get an early start I might add - they must be related to roosters.

These guys were sitting on our picnic table when we got out of the tent

We also had a herd of about 12 elk walk through our campground one morning as we were just finishing breakfast.

Later on we saw an even better elk with quite a rack on his head. He looked so awesome!

We saw quite a few buffalo's roaming around - they are so BIG!!

While we were eating dinner at a picnic table by Old Faithful we had a coyote walk past our table - that was a little nerve racking as he was very close. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me at the table so we missed that picture.

While we were also at Old Faithful we ran into this guy that we aren't sure what he is. If anyone would like to enlighten us please let us know. He posed perfectly for us but he wouldn't tell us his name. According to the Yellowstone animal paper we think he could be a yellow bellied marmot but again we just don't know.

While we were driving to the north entrance of Yellowstone we saw a whole bunch of bighorn sheep roaming the hills
And our best animal by far we saw the very last day in Yellowstone. We were getting ready to finish the loop and leave and we saw a whole bunch of cars by the side of the road. So of course we stop and get out and lo and behold this animal was beside the road having some lunch.

The whole day I had been saying that all I really wanted to see was one bear. What an awesome grizzly bear. Parker and Ashleigh were so excited to see the bear - it was so fun!

We also saw a whole bunch of other animals that we didn't get pictures of either:
Pot guts
Squirrels
Pronghorns
Trumpeter swans
Pelican
Fish

I think we did pretty good in the animal category. Of course after we saw the bear Parker and Ashleigh were determined to find a moose and a wolf because they were still on the list. We never did find them though - maybe next time!