Yay for the Warkentiens! Eli finally gets to check out his home, and Gipper, the skittish cat, will probably go into hiding for at least the next eight months.
From Nick today:
Last night, Eli started to eat really well! He started going to the bathroom regularly, which really helped him to perk up a lot. He had only wanted to sleep all day yesterday, which made it hard to feed him. Now, he is often awake and alert, and when he tries to feed, he latches on almost immediately and eats really well for about 20-25 minutes straight. This has gone on all night and all morning. It’s such a relief, and much easier on Amy. She is able to get more sleep, and feeding takes at least half the time it did previously. (We would spend at least 1 hr. trying to feed him. 15-20 minutes to get him to start, and then it was difficult to keep him going, as he would just fall asleep.) He had some jaundice, which they said makes him so tired. Now that he is pooping regularly, he is getting rid of his jaundice, he’s more alert.
His blood culture is still really good. They stopped giving him the antibiotics this morning, and took out his I.V. which has also been a relief. It was very difficult to work around that thing while feeding him, etc.! He also had his circumcision this morning, which went really well. We will be going home around 1:00pm or so! Time to pack up this room!
Other than that the biggest news of the day is that Harvey helped Bruce escape the backyard again. I had shoved some bricks into the space that had already been dug out under the gate but those looked like they’d been picked up and moved, so I’m guessing Harvey had dragged them away. So I grabbed some snacks and started walking left out of the driveway when Bruce trots up to me from across the street to the right, happy as you please. It was like he came up to me saying, “Hey Dad! Whatcha doing out here?” So I told him to go inside and he went on up the driveway and up to the door for me to let him in.
Bruce is having too many adventures lately. I’m going to have to lay down some concrete under the gate I think.
Work continued to be pretty busy. Not overwhelmingly so, but satisfyingly so. Amanda came home and we watched TV. She was pretty tired after having been up late last night.
We got a call this evening telling us that Amanda’s name had been drawn from something at the Baby Expo she went to with Nick and Amy a couple weeks ago and we had won a free dinner for us and two other couples. There’s some sort of fire safety thing at the end of it, which isn’t a bad tradeoff since they’re taking care of the entire meal plus the tip. They said something about not taking children, but as it was explained to me it sounded like they meant older kids. I might call the lady back and ask about newborns.
I chatted with Michael Mercer a bit on Facebook (still am, actually). He’s itching to buy a surfboard so we looked at some online and now I’m in the mood to buy a new one (although I really don’t need to yet). I’ve also had the idea that I want to paint my board for a while now, so we were looking at pictures of videos of people painting surfboards. There’s so much you can do with a canvas like that!
Zach Dotsey
.