Her Old Self

Wynn had her follow-up appointment with the surgeon on Tuesday, and all is well. She has healed very well and got to jump straight into a "no dietary restrictions" lifestyle. We had anticipated that she'd need to be on mushy-but-not-quite-solid foods for awhile, but the doctor said she can have it all.

After I fed her a graham cracker or two Tuesday evening, she got this look on her face that said Hey! You're feeding me FOOD again! Then the begging started. She pointed for more graham crackers. She pointed for goldfish. She got progressively happier as each snack she asked for was given. Within an hour, she'd turned back into her old self. She was rolling on the floor, giggling, and kicking her feet in the air. Suddenly, she understood the concept of "giving five" and handed out five with great generosity to Scott and I. (She gave Ranger five too - but on the nose, which he wasn't too happy about.)

While we managed to maintain her weight through the hard times of the liquid diet, our girl still wants to grow. She's packing away the food - after what I'd describe as a lumberjack's breakfast yesterday, she pretty much passed out in her bed for over three hours. With a full tummy, she could finally sleep soundly.

We feel like we have our daughter back again - cheerful and funny (with moments of toddler stubbornness thrown in to keep us from getting too complacent).


Ann

Home Again :-)

The pictures show Wynn the day of surgery - not at all happy - and right before they took out the IV and sent her on her way - tired, but so much more content.

Wynn was discharged from the hospital around 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon. She'd made a big leap in her recovery in the afternoon - eventually, she was parading around the nurses' station in her diaper, pulling a toy stroller and baby doll behind her. The nurses coming on duty for the afternoon all said, "Well, she seems to be feeling a lot better." We had to carry her back to her room when she started insisting on going into the rooms of neighboring patients.

She slept pretty well last night - mostly just flopping around like a penguin because of her no-no sleeves. She slept most of the night on the air mattress, using one or both of us as pillows the majority of the time.

She put up quite the struggle about not being able to feed herself her cereal this morning, but after she watched Scott make a show of feeding me my bowl of Cheerios (not our normal procedure, by the way), she decided that it was okay for him to feed her too.

I made a trip to the grocery store to find easily mushable food; for the next few weeks her diet will consist of nothing thicker than mashed potatoes. We worked so hard to get her to gain all that "good" weight since we got home from China; we really don't want her losing any of it now that she's on this liquid diet. (Fortunately, milkshakes are not only allowed but encouraged by her doctor.)

The pain seems to have subsided substantially; she had plain old infant Tylenol at 7 o'clock this morning and hasn't shown any indication of pain since.

We're all so happy that she's bouncing back so quickly ... and that we're not eating hospital cafeteria food anymore.

Ann