Olivia had an endo appointment last week, in Boston. We make the drive in every three months and while it's an all-day affair, we both really like her endo team and feel the trip is worth the effort.

After dealing with the horrible traffic on the Mass Pike and Route 9, after wrangling two toddlers plus their gear plus Olivia's gear and after managing to make it thru the Garage Of Doom without scraping my bumper on a single wall, we arrived.

Olivia was seeing her CDE today. When we initially started going to Joslin, I wasn't crazy about this woman, but she's really grown on me and we have a good relationship now. She's very down to earth and forthright and I love that in a health care provider. The whole reason we switched from UMass to Joslin was because I felt the endo they had there was very wishy-washy.

Anyway. Things look good with Olivia. Her cholesterol was very low, which is great. Her a1c had dropped from 8.3 to 8.1 - not great, but it's slowly coming down after a high of 9.3, so I was pleased with the progress. We talked about the chance of my insurance covering the CGMS for her (not bloody likely) and discussed camp and school. And then we moved on to the big issue - Olivia forgetting to check and/or put her number in her pump.

Deb, the CDE, was very understanding about this, but also firm, saying that just because Olivia is a teenager, with a teenager's typical forgetful brain, wasn't going to get her out of having to remember this. We discussed ways to help her remember and came up with me putting reminder alarms in my cell phone. Olivia puts alarms in her pump, but she shuts them off and forgets to check, so they're pretty useless.

So from 4 p.m. until 9 p.m., I have reminders set in my phone. On weekends, I have it every two hours, starting at 9 a.m.. It seems to be helping. We need to do something - it's very hard to make changes in her regimen when I don't have a full picture of what's going on. She had been complaining of being high for a couple of days, but when I went thru her pump and put the info into my handy dandy spreadsheet, I noticed those highs were generally when she'd forgotten to enter a bg, forgotten to enter carbs or had forgotten to bolus entirely.

So far, so good. It's only been a week, but hopefully if we keep this up for another couple of weeks, it will start to become a habit, for both of us.