That beautiful girl is Ella Renae silly! The person standing next to her is Miss Poland International™ Anita Brzeski. She was visiting the hospital to bring some smiles to the kids.

Typically, the volunteer visitors are comprised of the canine variety that come by to bring joy to the kids who aren’t feeling too well. We’ve had a few dogs stop in and love on Tina and me since we’ve been here.

That is what made this meeting a bit funny because the hospital representative had knocked on the door and asked if we wanted Ella to have her picture taken with…. and I didn’t quite hear what she said next. Miss Poland was not at the door when she asked this, so I was anticipating a dog entering the doorway at any moment. Needless to say, it was no dog. =)

You can see in the picture that Ella was more interested in the princess on the screen than the one standing next to her. Anita was very gracious and asked about Ella’s story. I told her a little about the journey Ella has been on and what a miracle our girl is. It was sweet of her to stop by and take some time to meet our girl.

Tina left us this morning to go show our house, run some errands, and just escape the hospital for a bit. Grandpa Joel (Tina’s Dad) brought me lunch and afterward we took Ella on a little walk around the hospital. It was such a gorgeous day here, we had to get out.

Overall I think Ella is doing real good. She’s not showing any signs of discomfort from the surgery and her incision is healing up nicely. We’re still trying to find the balance of meds that are going to work for Ella moving forward. Her BUN was 22 today so the docs decided to discontinue all of her diuretics. Tina and I are real happy to see her come off them, we just hope she’ll be able to maintain a steady balance in the coming days.

At this time she’s not showing any signs of respiratory distress, but her heart rate has been more elevated (170 awake, 145 sleeping), and she was not 100% happy today. There are a lot of things that could be contributing to this, including the fact that she’s cutting a tooth (wow…a normal baby thing) :). We’ll be keeping an eye on this closely though.

We’re still trying to increase the volume of her feeds and as of today she’s up to 75ccs over a 90 minute period, 5 times a day, plus her overnight continuous feed. We’ll be pushing her forward in this area as much as we can so she can be as close to her feeding goal as possible before we go home.

Thanks to all of you for the love and prayers that continue to strengthen us daily. Please pray that Ella will stabilize nicely on her medicine regiment, for her to tolerate her food increase, and for her overall progress. Please also pray that the Lord will give us wisdom and discernment in the coming days and that Tina and I would catch up on our rest as well.

Thank you Jesus for our beautiful little princess.