Bentley's 1ST birthday!

Bentley Stone Harker Campbell turned 1 years old on Friday August 13TH!

Doesn't he sort of look like Jack-Jack from Disney's movie The Incredibles???

We celebrated his big day by keeping things simple and inviting just our families who live near by...  among the guests were Uncle Jim and Aunt Celeste, cousins Kirstyn, Alec and Christian, Aunt Megan and Uncle John, Aunt Laura and Grandma and Grandpa Campbell.  Can you believe this is the fourth consecutive year I've planned one of my childrens 1ST birthday parties?!  I admit, I do LOVE to throw a good party, but there are times for sure when I need a break!

We served Bentley and our guest baby peas and carrots, dinosaur chicken nuggets (Noah and I ate gluten free chicken nuggets... yes they make those now...), seasoned steak french fries with all sorts of dipping sauces, applesauce and watermelon for dinner... so basically it was a meal that Bentley could eat and enjoy.  My sister Celeste made fresh raspberry lemonade for our party guests to drink. Thanks again Celeste!

I've really gotten A LOT of use out of these colorful buckets below that I bought the boys for their Easter egg hunt in April... the buckets worked really well as containers to serve most of the food in AND they brightened up the food display.

I decided to order Bentley's birthday cake and cupcakes from my favorite bakery called Dippidee (click here for info on the bakery); I don't mess with making cakes or cookies anymore from real flour, I've gotten too sensitive to the stuff that sometimes it's made me really sick.  I ordered a variety of mini cupcakes for our party guests to eat, including red velvet with cream cheese, coconut cream cake and chocolate.  My sister Celeste brought me and Noah a couple of red velvet cupcakes that were gluten free from another favorite bakery of mine called Sweet Cake Bake Shop.  It specializes in making desserts that are completely gluten free; their desserts are DIVINE (click here for info on Sweet Cake Bake Shop). We also served ice cream sundaes... Bentley's cake was ADORABLE!  It turned out so MUCH cuter than I had envisioned it looking when I placed the order.  It was a small 4 inch 4 layer chocolate cake with butter cream, wrapped in a thin layer of turquoise fondant and on the front of the cake was the Bentley car emblem made from shiny silver fondant.  It looked awesome and the best part about it is that it didn't cost me a fortune to have made!

We sang "Happy Birthday" to him...

He ate cake...

... at first he only sampled the frosting...

... but he soon realized that it was more fun digging into the WHOLE cake!

Cohen walked around the house with frosting on his nose for a long time 

without even knowing it was there!

I let Spencer quickly rinse Bentley off in the shower... 

HE WAS A MESS!  

During which time the boys enjoyed wrestling with their cousins...

Spencer and I took a moment for a photo op. with our newly 1 year old...

Isn't it obvious from the pictures above whom Bentley inherited his good looks from???

Okay, I know you're probably thinking he gets them from me, but truth is, he looks A LOT like Spencer, right down to the same shaped head.  However, Bentley does get his gorgeous blue eyes and blond hair from me.  He's actually beginning to resemble Noah the most though.

Bentley opened his presents...

... most of which his brothers claimed as their own...

... that's how things roll here in our family...

... the brothers work like a wolf pack.  

For the time being until Ian outgrows Noah, 

Noah's at the head of the pack,

followed by Ian and Cohen  

and unfortunately Bentley's at the bottom...

... the only thing the boys didn't care to take from Bentley 

is this new little BYU cougars shirt grandma and grandpa gave him... 

they probably knew it wouldn't fit them.

I think it's fair to say that we had a fun evening celebrating with family.  Everyone got a good belly laugh when Grandpa Campbell pulled out a pair of his old glasses and grandma put them on Bentley.  He looked ridiculously funny!

I can hardly believe a year has gone by already that he's been part of our family.  He's truly such a good baby... he's super mellow and really easy to care for. He can say "HI" (it's the most adorable "HI" you've ever heard), "Dadda" (he's a daddy's boy) and today he said "Momma" for the first time. He likes to sleep a ton and eat a lot.  It took him a while before he had any interest in eating baby food; he was about 10 1/2 months old before he ever ate anything other than a bottle of formula.  I actually had to take him into to see a specialist regarding this matter, who then told me from time to time they'll see babies like Bentley who just don't develop the muscles in their mouths necessary to eat solid foods at the same time the average baby does.  She recommended that we encourage him to chomp on things that could reach the back of his mouth to help him develop those muscles, like celery sticks or a toothbrush.  We followed her advice and pretty soon after he started to show interest in food other than his bottle.  We began just by feeding him pureed foods like bananas and we've only recently started to give him other foods to chomp on like dry cereal, cut up, malleable fruits and in fact it was on his birthday that we actually tried to give him something like chicken nuggets and peas to eat.  He's now at the point in which he'll pretty much eat a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g.... He L.O.V.E.S. food! It's a good thing his first 4 teeth just grew in last month (two on top and two on the bottom), now he can chow down at meal time!

Bentley's a real big chunk!  He's got the rolliest, fattest little arms, legs and cheeks!!!! I just love to squeeze them!  He's always kinda been a chunk so imagine what a surprise it was to learn during his one year Well Check Up on Monday that he's only in the 1ST, yes, 1ST percentile for his weight!!!  How on earth could that be???  He's such a chunk and he's my only baby who has ever had to wear a size 5, yes, I said size 5 diaper.  Are all the other one year old male babies in this country just incredibly FAT and overweight if my chunky kid can only make it into the 1ST percentile for weight???  He weighs 17.8 pounds.  That's a pretty normal weight for a baby his age, don't ya think???  Well apparently not so, and evidently I should be more concerned like his pediatrician was.  Bentley's doctor was extremely worried about his weight gain, since for the last 6 months his weight has just sort of plateaued at 17 pounds.  He hasn't even gained a pound.  I've been ordered to fatten him up; told to do whatever it takes to make him gain weight... it's a good thing Spencer "accidentally" just bought another expensive case of  baby formula for him when I thought we were going to switch Bentley onto whole milk; the doctor told us to keep him on formula and give him extra scoops of the stuff in each bottle until he gains weight.  We'll check back in a month to see if he's added any poundage.  He also hasn't really grown much in height; he's been practically the same height these last 6 months as well.  He's 28.75 inches long putting him in the 18TH percentile among other little boys his age and that head of his... well it used to be HUGE, and I'm not exaggerating, but thank my lucky stars it hasn't really grown a whole lot either, it's finally a normal size.  Like I said before , I'm not terribly concerned about Bentley's stats,  only because all my boys, with the exception of Ian (he's a giant) have been low on the growth scale. Neither Spencer nor I are terribly big people, and we both come from pretty short petite families.  I kinda believe Bentley just started out big, as some babies do, but now he's just growing as he should, slow and steady.

Which brings me to remember, Spencer and I were SO excited when he was born healthy to FINALLY have a baby without any complications; we'd been through SO MANY other health obstacles with our 3 older children as infants and toddlers, we thought we scored by finally having a child with out any problems... we were totally wrong of course and completely blindsided when we discovered the Mastocytoma on his chest when he was only a couple of weeks old; the thing blistered and bubbled any time we touched it and it looked terribly painful... at a follow up appointment when he was just 3 months old we never expected to hear Bentley's doctors tell us he has Infantile Scoliosis... at 5 months old we had Bentley fitted for a helmet to help improve the shape his head because his doctors determined he had Plagiocephaly and Brachycephaly and at his 9 month Well Check Up in May the doctor diagnosed him with a condition called Hypotonia; it is not a specific medical disorder, but a potential manifestation of many different diseases and disorders that affect motor nerve control by the brain or muscle strength.  It is a state of low muscle tone, often involving reduced muscle strength.  The diagnosis should have left us worried and concerned as parents, more than it did, but we've been dealing with the same problem since Noah was born... Noah, our eldest, has the same condition.  The pediatrician considered asking us to take Bentley to consult with a geneticist and a neurologist but refrained from asking us to do so since it's time consuming, costly and we are already familiar with Hypotonia; not to mention the past doctors, specialists, blood work tests and chromosome panels, MRI's and CT Scans were all inconclusive.  The only thing in the past that seemed to help Noah was physical therapy, so that's exactly where the doctor suggested we take Bentley for now.  On this last visit to the doctors, during Bentley's 1 year Well Check Up, I expressed a concern to the doctor about how his extremities, particularly his legs, tend to often turn purple and his feet are always cold... It's something that I, along with a lot of other people, especially strangers, have all noticed.  It's been happening to him since he's been about 10 months old.  The doctor seemed to be a little troubled by this and examined him to see if what I was saying was true.  Indeed it was, it didn't take the doctor but a second to see that something was different and off about the color of his skin and temperature in his feet....This little boy we so naively mistook for  "healthy as a horse" when he was born has surprised us with one condition after another that has needed some sort of medical care.  

The GOOD NEWS: His Mastocytoma hasn't really given us too many problems.  After we learned what it was, we have avoided touching it and consequently it hasn't blistered too often or bothered him.  Recently I took Bentley back in to be seen by an orthopedist to have his spine looked at and the curvature in his spine has improved from once being a 23 degree curve to now a 10 degree curve.  The doctor believes that the curve in his spine will only continue to improve as he becomes more mobile.  We're set to go back in to have his spine checked again in another 5 months.  As for his Plagiocephaly and his Brachycephaly, he wore a helmet for 4 months straight, until finally the helmet no longer fit correctly around his ears.  I wish I could say the helmet worked effectively and corrected his head shape but it didn't.  He even wore it more than what the doctor asked us have him wear it.  He wore it every day, all day, with the exception of during bath time. Our doctors couldn't explain to us WHY his head shape didn't improve with the helmet so they asked us to take him up to see another cosmetic specialist at Primary Childrens Hospital in Salt Lake to get an MRI and see if his bones prematurely fused.  The technicians there did the MRI after which the specialist looked over the scan and concluded nothing was wrong.  His only guess was that perhaps the helmet didn't work because his head hadn't grown during the four months while he wore it!  I guess it happens to only a few kids who wear a helmet.  At least we had an answer, but it would have been nice to know this BEFORE we paid for the helmet... those things are NOT cheap. His head is still pretty darn flat in the back, but I've gotten used to how it looks and now that he's started to grow more hair, it definitely looks much better than it did before. I've taken Bentley in a couple of times to physical therapy... since our move, it's only been about once a month, but the doctor told me at his last check up that it should be more often, like once every week or two.  Therapy has helped him some.  He finally started to sit up once he turned 10 months old and at 11 1/2 months he learned how to get into sitting position from lying on the floor.  He still hasn't shown ANY sign of crawling yet; for now he just sort of rolls to the toys or food he wants off of the floor.  If he's anything like how Noah was as a baby, it will probably be a couple more months before he begins to crawl and he'll probably be closer to two years old before he begins to walk.  That's not a problem with either me or Spencer, 3 is already enough to chase after for now!  As for that last concern regarding his legs turning purple and feet always being cold, well the doctor asked me to take him to the hospital lab to have a variety of tests done and also have an ultrasound done on his heart and veins.  His guess is that it probably has something to do with his thyroid or his vascular system but he can't be sure until he gets back test results.  I'm not too anxious about the problem; I have an idea things will probably be fine but it would be nice to just get some answers so that the next time a stranger looks at him horrified and asks me what his problem is, I can answer them confidently and not have to worry myself...


Regardless of any of the medical concerns we have or have had with Bentley, he truly has been a joy and a blessing to have as part of our family.  I love him!  Spencer loves him and most importantly his brothers love him.  He's already won their hearts.  They might like to pick fights with one another, but at the drop of a dime, Noah, Ian and Cohen WILL DO ANYTHING to make their baby brother Bentley happy.