Day +258: a hopefully minor worry

The latest worry about Mina Brigitta is what apperas to be a sinus or ear infection that might be expanding. She has some pus in her ear, and her eyes have been a bit puffy the last few days. It's also true that she's been short on sleep, so that could be contributing to making her eyes look. And she's not feeling badly, not does she have any mucous; on the contrary she seems to have more energy than ever despite the sleep issues this week. So they're not real worried, but they did take an X-ray (inconclusive), order a CT scan (Mina refused to go into the machine, so they have to reschedule it with sedation), and send her to an ear, nose and throat specialist who prescribed some eardrops with antibiotics and steroids. She's supposed to go back in a week, provided she doesn't start acting sick. Hopefully pretty trivial stuff, especially when compared to others like Lily Claire who are still right in the middle of it (Lily Claire has acute Grade IV GVHD of the skin and gut, just like Mina Brigitta did; she's stable, but in a tough position).

Mina Brigitta has been very cute the last weeks. She spends a lot of time taking care of her babies. She lays them down on the couch, the chair, the floor, or wherever, carefully covers them with blankets one by one, and then comes to tell you that "Baby sleeping!" Isaac even gets into the spirit and starts saying "Shhh!" The other night she asked me to wrap her baby. It must have been something about the way I wrapped her, but she looked at it, and then said "Dis Waah Baby Jesus!" Then she wanted me to put her to sleep "On the Hay!" She was so pleased with her new game that she spent the rest of the night talking about "Waah Baby Jesus!" Kari points out that she must have forgotten about the "No crying he makes" part.

She seems to be getting more active physically. She likes to pretend she's jumping. She bends her knees, gets very low, and then "jumps" as high as she can. She still only gets one foot off the floor, but it's a start. Isaac is getting into the spirit of monkey see, monkey do these days, so then he comes over and starts bending way over too. He has no idea what for, but he laughs right along with Sissy. The other day when she just got home from somewhere, I asked her what she wanted to do, and she said "I want to run and play!" It's one of her favorite phrases these days.

Another time she was saying "Bye-bye!" and when I asked her where she was going, she said "Fun! Going to fun!" I told her I thought that sounded like a nice place. Isaac likes to say "Ba-ba!" now too. He doesn't know how to say "All done" yet, but he figured out if he said "Ba-ba!" and waved to his food, it got the message across. He's also saying "Ah-oh" when something falls. And a horse says "Knee", the cow says "Moo" where the vowel sounds like "book", the dog pants, and the cat makes some sort of high-pitched yowling noise. Oh, and many animals say "Rowr!". He also says "Dass!" for yes, and when he says it he always gets a very serious look on his face and nods his head up and down slowly. The other thing he's doing is singing. He carries no tune whatsoever, but when he walks around making high-pitched noises in a certain way, we're pretty convinced he's trying to sing. He is one funny kid.

The other story I forgot to tell last time was that Mina and Isaac got a little wooden zoo for Christmas, with a little centerhouse and pens that you can build for the animals. It's very cute, and they'll enjoy it more and more as they older. But Mina looked at it and said "What's a zoo?" So during the next clinic appointment Keri asked if the zoo was OK, and they said yes! So I took them to the SF zoo between Christmas and New Year's. We saw the giraffes and tigers and lions and gorillas, and stopped and glanced at some other animals like hippos and gibbons along the way. But the highlight for Mina Brigitta was climbing on some very realistic-looking brass lion statues. They had a great time, and the zoo is quite close to our house, so it will be nice to have another option to entertain the kids