What is normal anyway?

Easter egg hunt from this past weekend

Troublemaker, capital T

Sorry it's been quiet on the blog front. There hasn't been too much going on. It seems to be settling into our new normal. We've talked about that term before, and to be honest, it's not something we like to use, but it's probably the most accurate way to describe our life at this point.

Sophie is doing ok. She doesn't really eat solid food, b/c of her TPN. It's a 12-hr infusion overnight, where she's connected to a small pump and bag of TPN, which contains all of her nutrition, vitamins, lipids, etc that she needs. Most days she will drink a bit of juice (with her Zofran, anti-nausea), and perhaps a bite of food. The past 2 days she's been munching on microwave popcorn, of all things. She doesn't want anything else that we offer except popcorn (in a Michigan Wolverines bowl!). We took a trip to Jewel yesterday, and she also wanted Danimals smoothies, so I got that for her, and she downed one when we got home! It's a bit odd now, though, that there are only 3 mouths to feed in the house. Not that Soph ate that much, but most of our grocery shopping for the past 3.5 months or so was centered around what Soph would eat. Now, not really an issue. We just have a whole bunch of Pediasure in the closet. If anyone needs Pediasure, hit us up!

But otherwise she is most always in good spirits. Her gait has gotten better, but she still walks with a limp. We are sending her to preschool 3 days/wk, just to keep her engaged and occupied. Last week was Spring Break, and she was pretty bored. iPad can only keep her occupied so long, and she's mastered all the jigsaw puzzles in our house. I bought a bunch of sticker books, which is also one of her favorite things to do, but Selah keeps putting the stickers on the wrong pages when no one is looking.

The home nurse comes once/wk to change the needle on her port. Jeannie has become an expert now in administering the TPN, disconnecting from Soph's port, etc. It's not something a parent would ever think to be doing, but then again there's been too many things/thoughts/events in the past 4 months that we could never have imagined.

Next chemo is April 23-24. It will be the same drugs and process as the one in March. Soph handled that well, so we hope for the same in 3 weeks.