Strawberry Girl

Every day is better!   All week last week we had the hardest time getting Little Miss Emilee to drink ANYTHING.  We were lucky to get hardly anything in her as far as liquids and she was barely eating.  We were actually limiting her time outside because we were afraid of her getting dehydrated. She would sip throughout the day and then we would force her to drink an ounce THEN all of a sudden she woke up Saturday morning and decided that it was time to drink something.  I don't know if it was because we were trying Strawberry Pediasure or if she was just hungry...  I think it was the Strawberry flavor.  She drank 5 ounces that morning and then continued to drink throughout the day.  We were so very excited. Then on Sunday morning she drank six ounces. Granny Katie tried to keep track of what she was drinking yesterday (Monday) and it added up to close to 20 ounces!!!  To go from maybe 5 ounces a day to 20...  is a HUGE improvement.  Each day she is playing more and more and getting back to being happier and happier.

These are a few pictures from yesterday while she was playing.

She's looking underneath the toy where the ramp comes out after the cars went down.

I just love her look of concentration

one way of reading a book.  She had just been told 'no' and was whinning, so I was just trying to distract her. =)

Like I said, since Saturday...  she is doing SO MUCH BETTER at drinking from the syringe. She just lays there and drinks..  then watches me refill the syringe and then drinks some more.

I am really looking forward to Thursday/Friday.  Thursday night she will be back to sleeping without anything on her arms/hands and then Friday morning she can have her sippy cup back!!  Hopefully she starts to eat again like she did before.

Pictures from the last week.

Since I'm that behind on blogging.  SORRY! I have thought about it the last three or four days. But then with Emilee not sleeping through the night right now I decide to go to bed instead.

06/10/2010 (Friday)

06/11/2010 (Saturday)

06/13/2010 (Sunday)

She learned to crawl up the stairs so we had to put a baby gate up in the hallway.

Ready for my HAPPY BABY to be back

It has been a rough couple of days.  Emilee just is not satisfied at all with anything. She is no where close to being her old self again.  I'm so ready for that day.  She is having a hard time eating from the syringe and the baby food.  We are looking forward to Thursday because she can have her sippy cup back.  She's not sleeping well at night because of the "no no's".  She tries to roll over but can so she sits up and cries.  It's so sad.  I'm just ready for her to feel better and this all be behind us. SOON!

These are a few pictures from the weekend before her surgery.  I'm ready to see this smile more often.

this little dress is a hand me down that is 18 months in size.  She was fresh out of the swimming pool. But it's still cute.

This is a sunflower that the squirrels planted under their feeder.

Home...

I'm glad to be home.  We had a long day still but that's ok, it was our house. She slept a lot better than we thought that she was going to last night.  She slept from 10 until 6.  I think that we had every toy that Emilee owns out in the floor trying to keep her happy.  She still isn't herself yet, but we are working on it. She's drinking, but not as well as we would like... so about noon we decided to do what we weren't suppose to do and spoon feed her...  she got some ice cream and loved it.  So she would eat about two ounces of pedialyte and then have a small bowl of ice cream. We aren't suppose to spoon feed her to keep the spoon from hitting the repair, but since she didn't really have a typical cleft palate and her's was so far back into her mouth that we just decided that it would be ok and we would still be careful. She did just fine.  We made sure to only use about half of the spoon just to be extra safe. She's wanting to eat and it breaks my heart to not let her. She still slept a lot, but did take her afternoon nap in her crib and slept for two hours.  

Uncle Josh, Aunt Ashley, Sam and Freckles came to visit today.  Sam and Emilee played and helped keep her awake until her nap time.  

She played with her "Emilee Can Do" mat that Aunt Barbara made

We read some books

We rocked. She hands us the blanket and then just lays her head down.  Sometimes she falls asleep or pretends to and other times she just lets us rock her for a little while and then pops her head up and plays for a little while. I hate that she feels like she does, but I sure am enjoying the rocking. =)

The Box is back.  She played with this box the entire week that we were camping.  We put the play table back in the box to bring it home, so when we got the table out again...  she played with the box.. again.

ICE CREAM!  YAY!  She really likes ice cream...  Vanilla, Chocolate or Strawberry, she didn't care what flavor as long as she was getting to "eat"

All in all we had a good day!  At about 5:30 this evening she decided to crawl fast while we chase her and she saw the open baby gate in the hallway, so I let her go up the stairs.  When she got to the top she made a right turn and headed straight for the bathroom, went to the bath tub and stood up pointing at her toys in it, so we let her have a bath.  I took an alcohol wipe and tried to get all the sticky stuff off of her and then we let her play in the water.  I'm sure that it felt good to be clean. After that she played and then drank a little and Granny rocked her to sleep while we snuck to her house to eat.  (We haven't been eating in front of her because that's just mean). 

Post Op Day Two

Post op day two was 100% better than yesterday.  Late last night Emilee's breathing got really bad. At 11:30 last night, the nurse called the doctor about the upper airway issue and the swelling and this time he agreed to give her steriods to reduce the swelling.  She got her first dose around midnight. 

This morning she was able to sleep with hardly any snoring and then later on in the day when she would sleep we couldn't hear her breathing at all!!  YAY! It was so much better.

At about 6:30 this morning we got two 5cc syringes out, one with water and one with pedialyte.  They were sitting on the couch thing and she actually looked at them, reached down, picked them up and handed them to us, so we did the same thing that we had done all day yesterday... laid her back and got ready for her to fight..  BUT... she grabbed the tiny syringe and drank all of it..  and then another one and another one..  she end up eating about four ounces.  This went on throughout the day. She did GREAT!  We even went to the truck and got her 60 cc syringes and she would eat two of them (4 ounces) about every two hours.  This was enough of an improvement to get us started on going home. All she needed to do was keep drinking and have wet diapers.  Which she did.  We waited until 5:00 to get her last dose of the steriods and then until 6:00 to get her pain meds and then we headed home.  We got home about 8:00! 

Sleeping in her crib

She even played with Granny a little

Took a few wagon rides

We even got a nice little smile (isn't her gown just cute)

Headed home.  We thought that since she had gotten her pain meds just before we left she would sleep the whole way home... nope...  she didn't fall asleep until we were in the woodlands.  But that's ok.  I sat in the back seat with her so she could take her "no no's" (restraints) off.

Even though she is still very uncomfortable and irritable we are glad to be home. Emilee went to bed shortly after we got home but woke up at about 10:00.  After she drank a little and then went back to bed, she slept all night long. Which was a surprise to us, because she didn't sleep at all the two nights we were in the hospital. (Probably because she couldn't breathe)