Saturday Morning

Good morning, everyone. Katie is happily riding around in her favorite car this morning but has allowed us to stop and write while she eats chocolate cake. (Life is so hard...:))

The good news is that the nurses have fixed Katie's PICC line, so they can draw blood and administer medicines very easily. Katie is reacting well to her medications so far. It is early, and she may have more trouble with side effects pretty soon (24-48 hours), but she is managing well for now. Mornings are rough--she has trouble waking up and getting moving--but she is surprising lively once she is up and moving. She isn't eating as much, but that's normal. So far her blood counts are good. That will change soon, and we will need to be very careful about her exposure to germs, but she is learning to wear a mask. I have these funny pictures in my head of my littlest tomboy wearing a basketball sweatshirt (always basketball), a tiara, clip on princess earrings and a mask. It should be quite a look.

Katie continues to impress us with her strength and with her quirky sense of humor. She does what she is asked to do, plays when she can, smiles when she can and chatters away through it all. (She has not stopped talking in days!) She is ambivalent about nurses--they do the mean things--but she is warming up to them (she has favorites), and she loves Dr. Hollmans, who tickles her and even kisses her stinky feet. (Ewwwww...He's a brave soul.)

This is a challenging time for us because we are in something of a holding pattern, waiting to see how the medication affects her cell counts and hoping that her strength will return full force after the chemo breaks down and then flushes out all the leukemia cells. One funny note: We wear gloves now when changing Katie's diapers because of the toxicity of her urine. We probably should have been doing that all along! (Wouldn't that have made her first year with us more pleasant?!) We continue to smile and to laugh, and Katie responds well to good cheer.

Katie is really looking forward to seeing Joshua today. She asks about him often. We are even more excited to see him. We are eager to return to normal activities like playing with Legos and fighting about who gets to take the recycling out.

On that note, we really want to thank everyone who has pitched in. Thanks to my parents for bringing us really good cookies, lots of hugs and encouragement and the little important things like laundry detergent. ("Don't you even think about it," Grandpa.) Thanks to Rick and Jean for caring for our naughty little dog and for finding her a good new home. (We'll grieve that later, but we really do appreciate their efforts to find her some great new people to live with so we can get some germs out of the house and not have to put her in the kennel every time we return here for more therapy.) Thanks to Nana for raising Joshua in our absence. Thanks to Joshua, who is an extraordinary boy. Thanks to Auntie Heather for distracting us during Katie's tests on Thursday and for the Wiggles dvds. (We have already learned to hate the Wiggles!) Thanks to Sara, who is teaching my classes, to Mr. Harter , who is giving us time to figure this out, and to everyone at Lake Region who has sent along kind wishes. The littlest things mean a lot to us right now. It is really difficult to express just how much we appreciate your support. Thank you for running our lives so we can be here with Katie. We are looking forward to seeing all of you very soon! Love, Amy, Rick and Katie Grace