We're Home Again

Jonathan got to come home this morning!

That means not only did he not stay in for three weeks, he got to come home one day EARLIER than expected!

It's from all those people praying for him. We're all pretty happy - we were sort of expecting another few days and it was a really nice surprise to get the news early this morning that we could go home. We kids took the van and the car seat and met Mom and Dad at the hospital around 10:00 and then went out to breakfast before coming home.

Jonathan's still pretty listless, like a baby with a cold or fever, but he's rolling again and playing with his toys and looking around and nursing and all the things he's supposed to be doing. He's discovered he really doesn't like having poopy diapers. Maybe he'll get potty trained early...

Nah. He'll get used to it. Unfortunately!

We also managed to get all the tape that was holding the IV in his head off without taking all his hair with it. He has about a 7-9 inch incising across the base of his belly, but the last surgery didn't even leave a scar, so I'm hoping he'll heal just as cleanly. It looks promising, especially since only the area right where the stoma was has any stitches - the rest is just closed with surgical tape. So the stitches are only in one or two inches of the scar. The whole incision looks very good today - it's not even red and we can touch his belly and move his legs around and hold him up in his favorite spot on the shoulder without hurting him. On Thursday you couldn't even bump one of his legs without him pulling his knees up and crying.

The Strider's syndrome that made him sound so terribly croupy on Thursday went away completely by yesterday afternoon, so his throat has all healed up from the respirator too. His voice is definitely back.

When we started feeding him yesterday, his stomach would get really round and hard for a while and then would get soft. This was a little worrisome to us, but his insides were doing a lot of gurgling and the nurse told us that when the intestines are touched, the muscles stop moving for a while to heal and getting restarted takes a little while. Today his stomach isn't doing that anymore - he's still gurgling a lot, but I think a lot of the gas trapped in there has come out and everything's working better.

Right now we're quarantining him in Mom and Dad's bedroom so that the sick kids around here won't get him sick. They aren't allowed in there; not even Anna, who's the one 'clean' kid right now besides me and Elizabeth.

I will post some more pictures in the next few days. The camera is getting full and we need to dump the pictures, but it takes time to sort through them and name them and file them properly, so I need longer than the few minutes I've been taking to update this site.