Hand Mouth & Foot Disease

I've been slowly working on this short post for the past week or two and yet still haven't completed it. Here is my last attempt...

Probably old news to most of you, but since it's such wonderful news I will share it anyway...Sweet Ella is in remission! I had Ellen in my lap as I read the post and when I started clapping, so did Ellen! She too is very excited!!!!! They still have 5 more rounds of chemo to make sure they catch every last bad cell, but this is great news!!!!

Sweet Pea is putting herself into kneeling from a seated position quite regularly now and is even trying to pull herself to stand using us sometimes. She will often launch (and I mean full force launch) herself at us when we are laying down next to her. I think the momentum helps her get up somehow. But if she is close enough for the launching to place her up on us then she pops up on her feet right away. She will even lunge over the top of us to try to get toys that are on the other side which is when she will go head first down the other side of us. Luckily she doesn't cry about it too often and it's quite entertaining to watch!

Her standing is really improving as well. She will move from a seated position (up on our legs or a small box) into standing and maintain the standing for a couple minutes now. It's such a change from a few months back when she refused to put any weight on her legs. I don't even have to hold her anymore, she can lean on the furniture to stabilize herself.

One of the reasons this blog post has been so slow in coming is because Sweet Pea got sent home from day care last Thursday with Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD). It hasn't appeared to be painful for her, but I think the lesions in her mouth must hurt because she really slowed down her eating. She had a rash all over her arms, legs and bum that first appeared last Monday and we thought it was an allergic reaction to either the peaches or the squash that she had eaten. We didn't do anything about it because it looked minimal and didn't seem to bother her. Well, apparently a couple other kids at day care had it too so on Thursday they were all sent home and off to the doctor we went. She weighed in at 19lbs 9oz! She is slowly gaining weight and I'm good with slow and steady. The doc said that there wasn't anything we could do for HFMD, but to let it run its course and if she was irritated by the rash to give some Benadryl. We haven't needed to do that and she is eating a lot more now than she was last week so I think we are on the road to recovery. We went back to the bottle because she was drinking more from it than she would from a straw so hopefully we can get back to the straws soon enough. Her rash is almost gone and hopefully she will be able to return to day care tomorrow if it is completely gone.

Speaking of tomorrow, Sweet Pea has her modified barium swallow study tomorrow afternoon. That is where they feed her food and liquid that has been laced with barium and "watch" internally what path it travels to determine if she is aspirating and if she is, then they try to thicken the foods to try to figure out how to stop the aspirating. We are glad to be finally getting this done and hope that Sweet Pea cooperates for it! I'll let you all know how it goes!

We had a good Father's Day and took a trip down to the beach. Sweet Pea put her feet in the sand, but that was about all she wanted to do. The sand was really hot so we had cleared off a section so her only wanting to put her feet in was ok by us. Next time we will take her down to the water and see what she does. She isn't a fan of cold water so I am not hopeful it will go well, but we shall see. I'll try to get some pictures posted in the next few days.

And finally, here is an amazing post on Living Life with E'sthat was written last weekend and it hit home in so many ways. It was great to see a post written by a dad, but what he wrote was even better.