Busy summer

We have had quite a busy summer. Besides Henry's many ongoing therapy sessions, we have had a few highlights.

Here we are with Henry's cousins looking quite patriotic on the 4th of July:

We finally found an opportunity to spend a weekend in Door County. Here we are getting ready for a road trip:

Here is lunch time with cousins:

Jim and Susan's house is surrounded by lush vegetation. When Henry spotted the fireweed, he broke into a huge grin:

Henry also got to spend some quality time with Diana:

We have been lucky enough to have quite a few visitors this summer. To name a few...

Ted took a brief hiatus from the glitz of Los Angeles:

Kate moseyed in from Montana:

Will also get to spend a couple of days with us:

Henry has been progressing well with his therapy. He is eating baby food several times per day:

He also gets lots of sitting practice:

In other exciting news, Henry has a brand new cousin, Emika Alice. Here she is with Peggy:

And on Daddy Wesley's shoulder:

As far as Henry's general health is concerned, within a week after his shunt implantation he began sleeping through the night about half of the time. To put that in perspective, prior to the surgery he had slept through the night a grand total of three times. We are all a lot happier with the dramatic increase in our dormant hours.

We had a little bit of a scare this past week. On Tuesday, Henry had a runny nose and a slight fever. By Wednesday, the runny nose and fever had subsided, but he refused to nap or eat and spent the day whimpering to himself. We were instructed by our surgeon to take him to the emergency department at Children's Memorial Hospital to make sure that he did not have an infected shunt. Once we arrived, we learned that the analysis of his cerebral spinal fluid would take up to 48 hours. The good news was that they could remove the fluid directly from the shunt valve rather than doing a spinal tap. Fortunately, our stay was cut short when Meade and I both contracted terrible colds. The doctors were convinced that Henry's symptoms were completely consistent with a cold and that the best thing for everyone was lots of rest in our own beds. We spent a total of 24 hours at the hospital, and we were all happy to be home again.

We have a lot more going on in August, and we are especially excited that Henry's Nanna will be visiting from Pennsylvania.

To close this post, here is a picture of Hank fast asleep.  The feet belong to Bean, his pet moose.