Our Family Blog – Mike, Louanne, Nadia, Amelie, & Dani
We are so thankful for the treats like these wonderful cake pops (LuluPops by Lina) that have shown up at our house 🙂
It’s been a stressful time for our entire family to have Dani in the cast, but our friends and family have shown us love through food. YUM!
May 7, 2014 was pre-op day for Dani at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children. Our friend Lucy came to pick up the big girls for an all day playdate and the rest of us headed for the hospital. Once all the documents were signed, they took Dani’s height, weight and blood pressure. Then Dr. Birch came in to talk to us briefly and go over the plan for the next morning. From there we headed over to x-ray and then to the station to have her blood work done.
After that they told us we could go for lunch and then finish meeting people and signing papers. We also got a text photo from Lucy of the big girls having fun.
Once lunch was finished they assigned us our room and we spent the next several hours meeting everyone from occupational therapy to nursing and we had one more meeting with all the doctors who would be involved in the next days surgery.
The entire staff was wonderful, but it was a really long day. All three of us were ready to go when they told us we could have a pass to go home for the night. We headed straight over to pick up Nadia and Amelie. Then we stopped by the house to make sure everything was packed up for them to go to Laura’s house for the night. Then we headed to Pei Wei to have dinner before dropping the girls off. Once home Mike and I let Dani have a long bath and then we had these special wipes we had to clean the surgery area with and it was time to get her to bed.
We picked Amelie up from museum school and headed straight for the zoo to see the GIGANTABUGS!!! It ended up taking two trips to see them all, so I am going to do a separate post with all the photos of the animatronics. They were very cute and the girls had fun seeing the giant versions of regular bugs.
The orangutangs were moving a lot and going to the side and reaching up to visitors like they were trying to get food. I have never seen them act like that and they would switch spots and make the same hand motions. The girls and I watched and laughed at them for quite a while.
The girls like to pose on the Komodo dragon every time we go to the zoo.
Dani is getting better about group photos 🙂
It was a very nice day at the zoo and the coolest thing we learned was that the alligator in Texas Wild is 72 years old. I took quite a bit of video of Dani walking around, which I will get edited together for a future post.
Dani loves to take baths in our kitchen sink and so I thought she should be introduced to our kiddie pool and water table before surgery. She liked the water table a lot more than the pool, but I expected that and she spent a lot of time watching and laughing at stuff her big sisters did.
In addition to playing outside, we gave her a long bath every day leading up to the surgery and then let her run around in her diaper since we knew she would be trapped in the cast for months.
We also spent many evenings outside on the porch swing and playing in the front yard.
