John's family came to Ohio to spend a week for the holidays! It was so great to see everyone -- well almost. One of his brothers and wife couldn't make it. We filled the whole week with lots of activities, games, movies, and of course Thanksgiving dinner. It was a great week!
I was finally able to hold my brand new nephew. He is so sweet and calm!
While they were here we also celebrated John's mother's 50th birthday party! We had the family over for dinner, cake, and ice cream. During the party we noticed the police shut down the intersection next to our house. We quickly found out that a huge police chase had happened and the car caught on fire right by us! The driver escaped and was hiding in the woods around our houses. It was pretty unnerving since he was armed! Thankfully a friend of mine works for our local EMS so we were able to keep updated throughout the night. Luckily he was found the next morning about a mile away. Even with all the excitement we were able to have a good time at the party. :)
The next day we went to a baby shower for John's aunt. It was a great shower, but unfortunately I didn't get any pictures.
After that we went downtown to see the Christmas lights. It was freezing, but we walked around a little bit anyway. The kids liked the window decorations at the casino (Higbees) and had a great time seeing all the lights everywhere.
We definitely are going to miss having them nearby. It's always good for the kids to get together with their cousins!
The Sunday after Thanksgiving we were given tickets to attend the Browns-Steelers game! Brandon Weeden donated the tickets to Children's Cardiology, so we were so blessed to be given them! Unfortunately with Ethan still fresh from the cath and the weather being absurdly cold, the kids definitely weren't able to go to the game. We did find friends who were more than willing to come though! :) Even though it was freezing and the Browns apparently forgot how to play football, we still had a great time! Lots of hot chocolate and layers upon layers of clothing helped us make it through. We even made it up on the jumbotron! It was very fun!
Ethan returned to school and has been making big improvements academically! He learned all his color words and almost all of the first stack of sight word flash cards! I'm so proud! He does have a long way to go still, but at least he's working on getting better with it!
He was very proud of his Indian hat he made in class. :)
He's also started expressing himself through doodles on his schoolwork. I'm a little surprised it hasn't happened earlier since he loves drawing so much, but it finally started up last week. He brings home his writing assignment that the kids do each day in class. Suddenly his letters started making really strange squiggles and turned into trains, vehicles, and people being arrested! After two days of question marks all over his paper and comments about needing to do better from the teacher, I put my foot down to insist on no more doodles. Thankfully his Friday writing assignment had writing instead of drawings! :)
Callie also has been doing very well in school! She actually won 1st place in her science fair! She competed with around 100 other fifth graders and did so well! I'm so proud of her! :)
Medically, things have been going fairly well. Right after the cath he went for a while with only one headache! He also had great oxygen sats - ranging from 78% to 83%! Those are great numbers for him! However, a couple weeks ago (right after I returned a checkup email with his doctor) the headaches returned. He is back to having 4-5 headaches a week! I don't know what happened, but I'm definitely not thrilled about this. His sats also dropped right away. He went down to 58% to 64% for about two weeks. He had no other symptoms, so I was really confused as to what was happening. I emailed the doctor again to let him know about the change. I was also hoping to jinx it back the way it was before! So far it might be working - he was at 73% today! :)
He seems to be coming down with a bit of a cough this evening and was feeling kind of rough. He insisted he was getting a bad fever - although the thermometer showed he was fine. He also had a pretty bad headache this evening. Hopefully a good night's sleep will help him feel better for tomorrow!
We have a cardiology appointment on Wednesday. We'll do an echo and post-op checkup to see how everything looks. Please keep us in your prayers that everything looks good and he feels better. I have another post coming soon about our Christmas prep activities! :)
