Decisions

[caption id="attachment_1187" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Baby Ellie and Dr. Daddy."][/caption]

For the next year, Mondays will be our days for chemotherapy.  Two exceptions to that:  if Ellie's white blood count is too low or if Ellie has not po-poed (to put it delicately).  So we were here on Monday for about 3 hours while we had a stomach x-ray and a  physical and blood draw. 

After Ellie had a big blow out of her intestines on Monday, we needed to come back today for chemo .  Ellie was highly sad this morning thinking of coming to the hospital once again.  She was much more interested in staying in her room and doing burk (book + work).  We started talking about how I too used to feel as if  hospital days absolutely had to be bad days.  That I had to feel sad, terrible, horrible.  Now I know that even though we are committed to going to the hospital, I can still decide what kind of day I want to have.  I refuse to allow the hospital to decide for me.  Or use it as an excuse to 'ruin' my day.  Ellie and I often talk about how there are things that we "have" to do but we always always have the choice about what we think about and therefore how we feel.  We discussed how we can decide what we want to focus on.  On the one hand we could focus on the parts of the hospital we hate, the pokes, the blood draws, the x-rays, the CT scans, the MRIs....which all feels very bad and sad.  Or we can think about all the wonderful people at the hospital.  How much we enjoy seeing them and

[caption id="attachment_1102" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Ben climbs a mountain of dirt."][/caption]

tit tatting (talk + chit chat), how everything is so much easier than when Ellie was younger, how clean it is at the hospital, how our whole experience of the hospital has been transformed.  Which of course feels much much better. 

Once we arrived at the hospital, Ellie set off telling everyone she saw how "jilled" (joy+filled) she feels this morning.  Right now she is sitting on the bed awaiting chemo telling jokes and singing songs while she breaks/peels crayons (thanks Grandma for the box of 48!!)

Last night Ben was having a hard time sleeping.  I was laying quietly beside him pretending to sleep, to show him how it is done.  Suddenly, his eyes popped open and he said, "You scared the crack out of me!"  To which we both laughed and laughed at his joke.  Not very conducive to sleep.