A beautiful day!!

The joy of running water. We had multiple buckets and even a plastic bag filled this morning.

Little man is all ready to go out. He didn't even complain about his snowsuit.

Well, it really was a beautiful day today. But, we didn't get to enjoy it quite like we had hoped. Since we were all home today, we were going to spend most of the morning outside. However, we got a call from our pediatrician at about 8:30 am saying that Andrew's blood work was abnormal and that it showed his thyroid hormone was low. He wanted to run a repeat test just to make sure. I told Henry that Andrew needed to have blood drawn and he cried for 10 minutes. He thought Andrew was going to have an operation. Oops! We headed out the door, and were relieved that Travis was able to meet us. Andrew first had to have urinary catheter to recheck his urinalysis. Of course, they got they cath in but he had just pottied and there was no urine in there. Instead, they stuck another bag over his privates to catch any urine/potty that may come out (the cath was removed.) The other day I was thinking about the indignity of having a plastic bag stuck on to catch urine. But, today I thought it seemed so much more pleasant than being catheterized. Then we headed down for blood work. This went very smoothly, and they were able to get blood on the first stick. Then we returned to the pediatricians where, to our delight, Andrew had pottied in the bag. Yaaaay!! We went home to wait for the results which, thankfully, came back negative. So, he does not have hypothyroidism.

We did make it outside this morning while Andrew napped. The boys spent about 45 minutes catching water from the gutter spout in sand pails. What glory!! They mixed rock soup with some added greens... grass. Then Henry started asking questions...'Why does water come out of this spout (in the sun) and not that one (in the shade)? Why won't all the snow melt in water? We had a short science lesson including: standing in the sun and then in the shade to see which is warmer and concluding why one gutter has running water and the other doesn't, and then leaving the bucket of snow/water mixture in the sun while we went in for lunch and rests and returning to find it all melted. It was beginning to remind of the days when Henry pelted me with questions about God and heaven. 'What does God look like? Does God sleep? What does God eat? Where will we live when we're in heaven?' We did go out again this afternoon with Andrew. He didn't say much, but at least he didn't complain. It was so great to be out in the fresh air.

*****Please, please, please pray for Baby James. His surgery did not go as they had hoped. There is still some remaining cancer that they were unable to remove without removing the little remaining kidney. This little guy has been through more in his 11 months than most people go through in a whole lifetime. Again, the link to his website is in my links area.*****