July 20

Okay, if you are severely squeamish, be warned that I will have a picture of Aaron’s incision at the end of this post. It is not open or anything, and is covered with little strips, but, just saying.

But first, we have begun work on Aaron’s new big boy room, which has been Courtney’s room up to this point, but is now going to be converted into “The Africa Room.” we are very excited about beginning this project and working on it with my parents help. Aaron is very excited about having a bigger room with more space to play and store his toys, and of course, he picked the theme. This is somewhat of a before picture, although not a truly authentic one, because to show it before Courtney cleaned it for my parent’s stay would just be criminal. Couldn’t bear to photograph it. Anyone with teenage rooms in their houses? You know what I’m talking about. At least here you can see the girly purplishness of it. The bottom half of the walls has purple wallpaper that came with the house, and at the time we moved in, Courtney had a purple flowerdy bed set, so it worked out. She has changed bedsets since then, but no decorative modifications have been made to her room because we couldn’t bring ourselves to put a whole lot of money into a room with surfaces you can never see because it looks like a tornado/trash heap.

Okay, more room updates to come.

Now that Aaron doesn’t have to wear a dressing over his incision anymore, I find myself nervous that he’s going to get it scratched or irritated. The dressing was extremely itchy in the hospital, and giving him a fair bit of agony for his little 4 year old self. He was constantly asking us to scratch his back, and of course, I would lightly rub around it, and he would say, “No Mommy, SCRATCH it, give me your claws.”

Now that the dressing is off and the skin continues to heal, we hope the itch will start to subside.

Ready for it???

As you can see, he has some bruises and irritation around it. At the time of this picture he still had plenty of bruises all over himself from surgery positioning and multiple IV lines, but as I make this post on 7/25, most of that is gone. The band-aid is over the hole where his drain tube was inserted. When the dressing came off that was just exposed, and since it was a hole in his back, I figured it deserved a little covering. Those strips will start to dissolve and fall off on their own in a couple of weeks. This is why he can’t be in water, because that would cause them to fall off before they should. They are all still there, but we will post another picture of his back after they are gone.