New News - Life Goes On

I agree with my friend, H, that every blog post should have a picture, so I give you this one, even though it's from back in March. It's silliness makes me smile, just like my girls do every day! :)

So you may have read my post about bringing D home from the hospital. Yep, pretty much a few hours after I posted it, I was driving back to the Children's Hospital with him. He'd slept all day and been kind of cranky. After a nice long nap I decided I should wake him up so he'd sleep at bedtime. I picked him up and he was hot, hot, hot. Sure enough he had a fever, so back to the hospital we went. He was admitted and has been fighting an infection since then. So, not counting the 29 hours he was home, he's been in the hospital since March 25 - nearly two weeks.

As before, we've learned things this hospitalization. Friends ROCK. We put our league of grandma's to work and were able to tend to things at home in the afternoons, confident that D was well entertained. The staff at the hospital is wonderful. The parent's bed at the hospital, not so comfortable, but ok. And above all, life goes on.

Our poor little guy is stuck in the hospital where they can monitor his infection and stay on top of his meds, but he is feeling great. We've fallen into a schedule that is working pretty well. T and I take turns staying nights at the hospital. The kids at home have gotten used to a one parent bedtime. J has really pitched in and helped out with the kids. Our routine is such that D is only alone for a few hours each day, during a common naptime for him. And we all check in together at the house, eating dinner together about half the time, before one of us parents heads in to the hospital. We're trying to be smart about it, and come up with a routine that we can stick with and not be exhausted. And hopefully it will be a routine that we can drop into whenever D is hospitalized.

And in line of thinking, we decided that tonight, for the first time, neither T nor I will stay at the hospital. We just miss each other, and in meeting everyone else's needs, we're down to talking over the kids at supper time and text messages or whispered calls after all the kids are asleep. So T will be home later tonight, and I'll go in early tomorrow morning. With luck, D will be asleep the whole time we're gone, and from experience we know that even if he's awake, he's very sleepy and isn't awake for long.

Finally, the good things that have been happening:

• The docs report that D is responding well to the treatments he has for his long term disease! And we're even noticing signs of this. Hooray!
• The girls are acting like... SISTERS! Playing really well together, fighting intensely, but then playing really well together again. Very fun! We've come a long way from the days when we couldn't have H in the room with another child without an adult being there, too. Again, Hooray!
• J, the same young man we had to force to leave his room and join us for meals a few years ago, now is such a vital part of our family! We find dishes done without being asked. He entertains kids when he sees we're tired. It's been wonderful.

So, I know it's crazy, and probably hard to understand, but we still have no regrets in taking D in! I'm looking forward to him coming home (though that's probably at least a week away...) but even stretched out like we are with him 30 minutes away... I just feel like we're so lucky. Bizarre. Just meant to be, I guess! Thank God!