Club Med, Days 4 & 5

The weekend arrived and the attending parents rotated positions.  Friday started with a Chinese feast in the hospital room.  Nancy, Nate, Jean, and our whole family were in the room together, gorging on fried rice, sweet & sour chicken, and various forms of shrimp and vegetables.  YUM!  The cleaning lady (who was, by coincidence, Chinese) came in to empty the garbage cans while we were still eating, then came back a couple hours later to thoughtfully take away the dinner garbage.  We thanked her for her foresight.  I'll have to slip a chocolate into her pocket next time she comes in.  They truly are the forgotten heroes of this place.

Cam went south to visit with her cousin, Aunt & Uncle for the weekend (an experience I don't remember ever having had as a child) and Em and I spend the weekend lazing around the house and doing a couple trips to the hospital for visiting.  OK, we also did some laundry, dishes, slept, watched TV, and ate dinner out at KFC.  It was a raucous weekend.  Woot.

When I returned today, Ben's school principal and his wife were visiting.  I had never had the opportunity to meet her before and she is really delightful.  She's of some form of African descent, but has the coolest almost-blue eyes.  I can't even describe the color...just amazing!  They brought him one of those shiny helium balloons and he just LOVES it!

We are finally settling into a bit of a routine--medications morning, noon and night...and late night.  Twice daily, he's getting the full on respiratory therapy--albuterol, flovent, and 7% hypertonic saline and he gets 20 minutes 4 times a day in the Vest.  In the evening they add another medication called Pulmozyme.  Once daily he gets one antibiotic, and four times daily he gets a second antibiotic.  Then four times a day they take his vitals, just as a matter of course.  Three meals a day, two snacks a day, doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers, residents, nursing students, volunteers...it's a constant parade of people in here from 8 a.m. to about 11 p.m.  Then he finally has a midnight snack and off to bed!  The volunteers are a great service, but I've turned them away more than once just because we haven't had more than a few minutes alone all day.  Yesterday one of them dropped off a Sorry! game, which we will play again tomorrow.  He played a game with Nate when Cammie was returned back from her visit.

Having some time on my hands, I am keeping busy with weaving.  I finished the Anchors Aweigh! weave yesterday and will soon be shipping it off to Wisconsin to its new owner.  He's already seen the picture and is pretty excited about receiving it.  I don't know if he's going to turn it into a belt or suspenders, but there's quite a lot to work with--it's 4 yards long.  Maybe he can do both?

My new project on the loom is for local SCA gal, JuJu, who requested a weave that looks sorta like watermelons to match an outfit she has already.  She grabbed the yellow and red weave that was set out for sale at Gypsy Caravan in January that I finished some time back and asked if I could do that in two tones of green, pink and a black center.  No problem!  Unfortunately, I lost my directions for how I did the yellow one, so I had to kinda make it up again.  It looks very similar, but I think it's narrower than the yellow band at only 2 cm wide.  I'll have to measure the yellow one when I get home.

I had packed my sewing machine and a couple of quilting projects to work on, but not having a good table to work on, I left it in the car.  The other day, one of the nurses found a spare dinner table for us and brought it in, and have never come back to reclaim it.  Now that I have a small table to work on, I don't have the drive to go get it.  Not yet, anyway. 

I guess the computer is keeping Ben awake, so I should head to bed myself.  More tomorrow.
K