Things keep getting better…mostly.

It’s amazing how fast some of these days go by. I hope the same is true for Elijah.

The nights are mostly consistent. He sleeps well and takes his medicine well, though sometimes he wakes up a bit more when taking his medicine. Still, he falls back asleep right away and seems fairly comfortable even being strapped to his wedge all night. Even if we gave him the option to sleep without it, I’m pretty sure he would choose to have it on.

We started the day with another gift opening session, this time opening some presents from Grandma and Grandpa Atwood. Abigail got a big poofy skirt, and Elijah got a treasure chest full of all kinds of goodies. He spent a good portion of the morning looking through all his goodies and was excited about all of the treasure.

Grandma Rice came by a little later in the day to watch the kids for a couple hours so Julia and I could get out of the house together. I can’t say we did anything too exciting, just a bit of shopping. It was nice to have some time just to the two of us, and I think the kids did pretty well for Grandma.

Elijah was also super excited because his friend Kevin had stopped by and given him a card and a gift. Elijah loves to play with Kevin, so I’m sure it’s disappointing that he isn’t able to play with him right now but this was a great surprise.

During rest time Elijah worked on the Lego set he got from Mr. Pat and Mrs. Jo yesterday. He really enjoys building things and its a great use of his time throughout the day!

Then, the Buchers brought us a wonderful dinner and spent some time playing video games with us. Tonight was boxing and we had some tired kids by the end. It was fun, and we’re thankful that people are making time to spend with us and to do things with us that Elijah can be a part of.

We also made some progress today in a couple areas. First, and this may be more than you wanted to know, but we’re making some progress going to the bathroom. Number one has never really been a problem, but number two was quite difficult for all of us. The main issue was that his bedside commode is adult size which wouldn’t normally be a problem except that now he’s got incisions on the sides of his hips which is where his legs rest on the seat. This meant that there was usually three of us involved in the process; one person standing behind holding him up off the seat, the other in front helping to ensure everything went where it needed to, if you get my drift. After a few times of this, we got one of those kids size seats that you put over a normal toilet seat, and used that today with the hope that it would better support him on his bottom rather than pushing on his sides. It worked. So today he was able to use the toilet pretty much on his own and much more comfortably. That was a great step forward for all of us. The other thing that went much better today was his shower. I had installed our new handheld shower and knowing what mistakes we made last time, we were able to correct those this time and his shower went much better. Up until now those two things had been two of the more difficult obstacles we dealt with, at least at home, so the fact that we made progress in both of those areas was a good encouragement.

Where we didn’t make progress, though, was with his fever. He’s still running a low fever in the 99s. We are still not overly concerned, but again just anxious it might be a sign of something wrong. Keep praying for that if you can. Other than that it was a great day!