Natalie's Appetite is Back

Natalie is eating again. Yeah! Yesterday she ate half of a grilled cheese sandwich and a little bit of a snickerdoodle cookie. Today she had some bites of a snickerdoodle cookie for breakfast, a whole grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, and Grant was heating up an uncrustable peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Natalie when I left the hospital tonight. Oh, she also ate a lot of the Hello Kitty whistle candies that Christine gave to her.

We still need her counts to go up. They were at 10 last night so don't know what they are tonight. They did take her off 2 of the 3 antibiotics she was on so we're hoping that may help her counts go up.

Natalie is doing well. We've been making stuffed bunnies and elephants out of t-shirts. So far, we've made a mama bunny, papa bunny, baby bunny, mama elephant and baby elephant. She has decided that she is not going to give them real names like her elephants though. They are not as perfect as her Gran's bunnies since we're stitching and cutting them by hand. Natalie designs the bunnies and stuffs them. I'm in charge of stitching them since it makes me nervous to see Natalie working with a sharp needle with her low platelet count.

We've also been playing the paper doll game that her Auntie Tracy sent to her. She loves that game and we play it every day at least once a day.

Grant and I have been taking turns to stay overnight with Natalie since it's grueling be there when she is on antibiotics. Every night we have to deal with the symphony of beeps from the IV infusion equipment througout the night as well as the numerous bathroom runs Natalie needs to take because of the high volume of liquids they are infusing into her body to flush the medicines through. Last night was the worst because right when I started to fall asleep, somebody started banging on pipes upstairs to fix something from 5am-6am. Then at 6 am, the hospital decided to do a fire alarm test with the fire alarms. At 7 am, I posted up our "Do Not Disturb" sign outside the door so that Natalie and I could sleep for a bit. Actually, it was for me to sleep. Natalie can sleep through a hurricane. We didn't wake up until 11 am today. When people comment that we like to sleep in, I have no idea where to start to explain to them that we are actually not sleeping in. They just have no idea how it feels to live in a hospital room.

On a completely different note, we would like to ask everyone to keep Grant's grandma in their prayers. She came down with pneumonia and the doctors don't think she has enough strength to fight through it. We are sad because we really wanted to go down to see her as a family when Natalie was done with her treatments. Please pray that she can fight through it.