Friday evening

Yesterday we finally got to go out and have some family fun! Uncle Chris was in town to hep us for a week, and he came with us to check out the aquarium that is just up the road from the hospital- it was really nice! Surprisingly big for being so far from the beach, and excellent exhibits. Lots of underwater tunnels and petting areas. Emma Kate was excited to get out and be a normal kid again, although we did have to hook up her toooobs about halfway through... she did great and only started to tire towards the end of the visit, which pushed her nap really late anyway. Other than Mommy taking a detour on the way home (this area is what I like to refer to as a vortex... I never get back to the house the same way twice...) it was a great afternoon out! The first in a very long time, and hopefully the first of many more fun days to come!

I loaded the pictures in backwards order, so there are some hospital pictures at the end, but don't let it confuse you- we are out of the hospital finally!

Today was our scoping appointment- we were supposed to take her in on Wednesday, but after the night of vomiting for Mommy and Emma Kate, they elected to postpone it until today. After an excruciating 2 hour wait with lots of people coming to talk, ask questions, and examine Emma Kate, she finally got in and was done in about 15 minutes. Dr. Rutter was pleased with what he saw, there was only a small "mushroom" shaped piece of granulation tissue that he easily removed, and he doesn't even see the need to put her on any nebulizer treatments at this point. He felt like she was doing really well, especially considering that she was a "redo" surgery. Our next scope will be on Feb 9 and if everything looks good there, we will likely wait 6 weeks until the next one. We have an appointment with Child Life tomorrow to try to help address the insecurities she has developed from all this, then there is a GI consult on Monday to talk about how we are handling her feeding issues and TPN/lipids, tuesday we go for a consult with the sleep center to address her sleep difficulties and possible nightmares she has been having since this started, and finally, there's the scoping on the 9th. Hopefully outside of these appointments we won't have to put her through a lot of stress over at the hospital. I guess we will probably be in and out for speech to assess her feeding as well.

We had a great week with Uncle Chris helping out- Emma Kate warmed up to him quickly, and he was great with Gretta too! We have Valerie and Kira coming tonight to help for a few days, and expect Greg to be headed home for a few days early next week when Mimi and PopPop come to help take care of the girls while Daddy is gone. I can't believe how fast January has gone by, hopefully before we know it, we'll be back home with a healthy and good-eating little girl!!!