Makin' Lemonade

We spent Easter this year much of the same as we did last year; at home resting and recuperating from a cold. Stephen woke up Easter morning with a nasty cough, so we decided to keep our germs to ourselves and stay home. Lucky for me, he passed his germs on to me and I ended up being the one who got it the worst. But he felt much better as the week went on and this past weekend, Stephen had a blast at his school's carnival playing games and getting temporary tattoos and then we made the trip to PA to Mimi and Poppy's house for our monthly trip to CHOP today.

Unfortunately, the trip hasn't gone completely as expected. Most of Stephen's lab work improved from the last visit (white blood cell counts, hemoglobin, etc), but his creatinine increased again. It's now been trending upward from 0.3 over the past month or two, so his nephrologist wants to do a kidney biopsy to make sure he's not having any rejection or a bout of Prograf toxicity. So we've come back to York from Pheladelphia where we'll meet up with Bill tonight and then head back to Philadlphia in the morning for Stephen to be admitted to the hospital. If all goes well, he'll have his biopsy at 11:30 tomorrow morning, have an uneventful recovery from surgery, and we'll spend one night in the hospital and then go home Wednesday afternoon with positive results.  My gut feeling is that his doctor is just being cautious and ruling out any issues and his new baseline creatinine level has increased to 0.6.  I really don't think there's anything to worry about, but I loathe being admitted to hospital and hate he has to go through another surgery.  And of course, this comes right before we're set to take a few days of vacation to Florida next week and Stephen's first airplane ride. And it's even more frustrating because he's been doing so great lately and looks so healthy!! But...it's always somethin'! 

Here are some pictures from Easter and getting ready for the Easter bunny:

Stephen grew almost 1/4" from our last visit to CHOP in March and is finally tall enough to ride his bike!

Easter, take 2! 

Monster truck at the York Revolution baseball game. This was taken 2 seconds before we almost got his by a fly ball.

Mimi and Poppy's neighbor, Mr. Dave, has a cool red tractor that Stephen loves and he was finally brave enough to ride the tractor with Mr. Dave. He's been wanting to ride it for over a year, but was too scared to get on it every time Mr. Dave came over. But not anymore!!