Happy Thanksgiving!

We certainly have a lot to be thankful for. Nora has truly taught us how to be thankful and appreciative for all of the wonderful things in life, like life itself!

Nora sitting at the dinner table awaiting her first Thanksgiving! “Hey where’s the turkey?”

Mmm Elecare…..she pretended it was turkey flavored. 🙂

The past few weeks have been very hard on Nora but on Thanksgiving day she finally turned a corner and really started feeling better. Since the rash and all of the troubles that followed started almost three weeks ago, Nora had not been her usual chatty self. She had been very quiet and low energy. But on Thanksgiving day she started talking and hamming it up to show us that she’s back on track. We’re so happy to have our beaming Nora girl back!

With all of the diarrhea Nora was having she developed Colitis and begin having bloody stools last Friday (11/16). I guess this is the pattern we should expect every time she has to have antibiotics, orally or intravenous. It was nerve wracking to see but this happened the last two times she had antibiotics so at least this was something we had dealt with before. She had 7 days of bloody stools and hopefully it has subsided for good now. Her poops have been blood free since Thursday afternoon (11/22). With all of the pooping and decreased feedings Nora has lost 1lb 4oz in the past two weeks. 🙁 She had been on 22 calorie Elecare for months now but she had to go back to 20 calorie Elecare. Now that her system is getting back on track and the bloody poops are gone we’ll begin tapering her back up to 22 calorie in the next few days. There has been one change in her diet in the right direction though. We started feeding Nora fresh rice porridge instead of powdered rice cereal last week following the recommendation of the Chinese acupuncturist and nutritionist Dr. Min Tian. Dr. Tian has been a great asset to many members of our family for years now. She is truly amazing, western medicine may not understand how she does what she does but it works. She said that dried boxed cereals tend to grow mold very easily and also there’s nothing better than the real thing. We started Nora on sweet Sushi rice and she seems to really like it. We slow boil it for 1-2 hours, or however long it takes to get it nice and mushy, using one part rice to ten parts water and then mix it with her formula. She’s been eating fresh rice porridge for almost two weeks now. Once her tummy is settled for a bit we are looking forward to begin introducing more new things to Nora’s diet.