DorrieDorrie

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Someone who does not get mentioned very often on this site is Dorrie’s grandmother, a.k.a. Grammy. She has been coming to spend the day every Friday to help with the housework, and usually every other Sunday just to hang out with her granddaughter and give Mom and I a break. While we were in the hospital, we were always being asked by the staff, “Do you have any family living nearby who can help out?” And Grammy was always our go-to relation. If not for her, the kitchen and bathrooms would never get cleaned, the bed would never get changed, the laundry would pile up… it would not be a pretty scene. So, I just wanted to start out by posting a thank you to Grammy, without whom Mom and I would be a couple of burned-out zombies by now.

The other reason I wanted to post was to report Dorrie’s first outdoor excursion last weekend. Grammy has been saying all winter that once the weather was nice, she was going to make sure that we found the time to take Dorrie outside for a walk in her stroller. Mom and I suffer a lot of intertia when it comes to moving our daughter around, because along with her must come her ventilator, her oxygen, her suction machine, her pulse oximeter, and her emergency oxygen, plus we have to rearrange her ventilator circuit to take out the humidifier and replace it with an HME. However, we both also agree with Grammy (and the developmental specialists we have talked to would agree too) that it is good for Dorrie to get to experience places other than the living room where she spends nearly all of her time. So, last weekend, while Mom was off at a book sale all morning, Grammy and I bit the bullet and packed Dorrie up for her first official stroller ride.

We did not go very far — just down the street, around the corner, down to the next corner, then back up. For the first half of the trip, Dorrie was more interested in staring at the little warning sticker on the inside of her car seat, but we stopped in each place where there were trees providing shade, and eventually she decided she felt like checking them out a little. Since it was our first trip out, we did not stay out for very long, but Grammy is planning on motivating us to make it a regular thing whenever she is around and the weather is nice, so I am sure there will be more tales of Dorrie’s adventures in the great outdoors to come.

Posted by dad, under our little witch