Crunchies!

While changing out the needles to access his port, Alan had about an hour or so free of IV lines! He got out of the crib and played on the mat, trying to stand again. His right leg is still very unsteady, but he enjoyed his freedom and was moving around quite a bit. Alan rolled around the mat with Kennedy and Logan's mommy while Mommy was enjoying a tuna roll that she brought. He eyed the food with such interest that we offered him his favourite Gerber Crunchies - the same thing he had been batting away for the last week. Hallelujah he's eating solids again! It was only a handful of Crunchies, some freeze-dried apple bits and a couple spoonfuls of yogurt, but it's the first solid food he's had since last Tuesday. Yay!

Not 100%

Alan has been doing so much better, laughing and playing. However, one thing has made perfectly clear that he is not 100% back to normal. While removing the needles to his port in order to change them, the charge nurse offered Alan his iPhone to play with in order to distract him. He showed him a "piano" app and a "drums" app, putting it within Alan's reach to touch the screen. At one point he even offered to let Alan hold it. Nothing. Is this possible? Our gadget happy boy not wanting to play with one of the latest smart phones?

Either Alan is a die-hard Palm enthusiast like his Mommy and Daddy (he's never turned down an opportunity to grab one of our Treos), the touch screen confused him (can it really be a cool gadget if it doesn't have buttons to push?) or he's just not all the way back to being our little monkey.

Things are picking up

Warning - Poopy talk in the first paragraph. Read at your peril or skip to the second paragraph!

We had a rather inauspicious start to the day. Mommy heard what she thought were juicy poops (there was, just not as much as she expected) and instead found that Alan had thrown up a little. It was to be expected, now that he is undergoing chemotherapy - it's just that he's never thrown up before. He was quite calm though, and was more upset by the process of cleaning him up.

The nurses were wonderful helping Mommy clean up, and Alan was quite intrigued by one of their name badges. This one had a blue jewelled pin on it - Alan has always loved playing with jewellery. He was so fascinated with playing with her badge we were able to take measurements on his legs and belly with out any fuss. This has been the most playful he's been in a week!

Seeing he was in such a good mood, when I put the balloons back by his crib, I flipped some of the curling ribbon over the edge to lay on the pillow. He started off slowly, just touching the ribbons while he sipped on his juice.



Pretty soon he was bouncing those balloons around like crazy. He was at it for a while until the doc came in to have a look at him. For the balloon play in action, scroll down to the video at the bottom of this post.




Everything still looks good. The doc reduced the frequency of his pain meds now that he's started to poop. By now, an increasing percentage of his pain is due to constipation rather than post-surgical healing or the tumour. No point in constipating him any further with high doses of morphine or codeine. We're on track to go home Monday!