A holiday to remember
We traveled to Ellensburg for Thanksgiving and stayed with Paul’s mom at her condo along with Paul’s sister and family (5 kids, 1 spouse and a puppy) with my mom at the neighborhood hotel. For the meal Paul’s three cousins, grandmother and uncle all joined in and most of us went to the Ellensburg tree lighting ceremony downtown on Friday night. Then Saturday hit. Paul’s mom started getting sick (stomach flu sick) in the middle of the night and we got a call in the morning that two of his cousins were sick also. We had planned on driving up to Grandview to see Paul’s dad anyway so we just packed up quickly and left the rest of our stuff in the garage to get on the way back to Seattle. We drove an hour and a half to Grandview only to get out of the car and discover that Alecia and Tonesha were now sick also. We stayed about ten minutes and then Zoe started throwing up. Talk about panic. We were three hours from Seattle and I didn’t know how she would handle a stomach illness (it was her first). I don’t think my heartrate dropped below 200 the whole trip home. Zoe puked the whole way, Noah was a bit freaked out by all the frantic pulling over but we made it home by 3:00 in the afternoon. By late evening I knew I was losing the battle against dehydration and should pack her up but I really didn’t want to take her in. Finally at about 11pm I was able to start giving her little bits of water (5cc’s at a time) every few minutes and keep it down. I basically woke her up every couple hours and pumped more fluids into her and was able to keep her home! It felt amazing to have her sick but not have to take her to the ER. It took another couple days before her voluntary fluid intake was back to normal but she didn’t have to be seen by any doctors at all!
Saturday night Paul succumbed to the illness and Sunday night Noah had a go of it too. All in all, 11 family members got the bug making it a holiday to remember.
Walking girl
Zoe has finally kicked her walking career into high gear which means we will not have to go back for physical therapy! About a week and a half ago she just decided she wanted to try walking across the room on her own and since then she’s switched from crawling everywhere to being on her feet most of the time. She still uses the walls for support most of the time but it won’t be much longer before she’s chasing her brother around (he can hardly wait). There’s a whole lot of imitation going on at our house.
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Upcoming Stress Echo
Zoe is scheduled for a stress echo on December 21st (I know, the week of Christmas) but our only other option was the night of Paul’s Christmas party. The stress echo is considered a day surgery because she will be sedated so we’ll be at the hospital all day long. The purpose of this test is to see what her heart does when adrenaline is pumping through her body. Since we can’t make her run on a treadmill yet they will sedate her, inject her with a drug that mimics adrenaline and then do an echo on her. They will also roll her clinic visit into this day so we don’t have to come back for yet another visit. Her labs have been spacing out a bit; we’ll go in again the week of Thanksgiving which is the first time in nearly a month.
Halloween Fun
Yes, I am now just posting stuff from Halloween. We got together with the transplant group for some 
pre-Halloween fun a couple weekends ago. One of the moms had the foresight to invite the transplant team and so Dr. B came to spoil the kids (of course). And here he is feeding her some diet soda.
We had lunch at the Spaghetti Factory and then went to the Aquarium where Noah had more fun than humanly possible. Our costumes were designed by Noah this year. His favorite cartoon is Curious George so Dad had to be the Man with the Yellow Hat, Zoe was Hundley (the elevator man’s weiner dog), and I was Chef Pasgetti. We also took the kids Trick or Treating at Paul’s office on Tuesday night. Unbelievably Zoe understood what was going on. After about two offices she started grabbing for the candy herself! Noah’s preschool also had a Halloween event called “Trunk or Treat” where the kids went from car trunk to car trunk trick or treating in the preschool parking lot. All in all, it was a fun few days.
