Tube Time!

We've been prolonging the inevitable for some time, but today we finally went ahead and had tubes placed in Noah's ears. Our ENT knows us well as he has performed 4 surgeries total so far between Eli and Ella Kate. Seeing as I was 2/2 on having to put my children under, I wasn't in any big hurry to have Noah follow suit. However, that all flew out the window when he had 3 infections back to back...in the summer...on top of the slew of infections he'd built up since he was 5 months old . Not an ideal situation. Hopefully, he'll fall in the 95% of kids who require only one set (unlike his sister) and all this will be a distant memory soon enough.

We had to be at the surgery center at 6:45 a.m. We went straight back and got him changed into this cute little number:

After completing a pre anesthesia consult, we headed out to wait in the play area.

This picture cracks me up. When we ask him to smile now he grins SO BIG and says "cheese!!"

Yes, he liked the barn. Can you tell?

After a little bit longer, it was time for triage. He sat in this "old school" scale (I mean doesn't it look like the car seats we had when we were little?? I found it hilarious.) to get weighed and check his oxygen saturation. He did really good with all that. You'd have thought he was used to all this.

After that it was more playtime until his turn for surgery. He loved watching the squirrels. Several were sitting in this window seal eating bird seed. I guess they were used to seeing children all day every day because they never moved-and you can imagine the toddlers, noses pressed up against the window, banging, pointing.

Soon after that, Noah's friend Max showed up. He was getting tubes too. Noah watched a little Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while he waited on Max to come play.

The boys didn't have much time together before it was time for Noah to go into surgery, but we got a couple of snapshots. To be honest, they could have cared less about eachother. The mommies cared more about the photo op than they did :)

Noah was called back and we walked him into the "bunny tunnel". This was the area right outside the operating suite. There were shelves filled with toys and he got to pick out whatever he wanted before he went through the doors. He didn't have much trouble deciding on some "quack quacks" (aka rubber ducks) and then it was time. The nurse told him to give us a kiss and he did. It was precious. He went right over to the nurse and went through the doors into the surgery suite without so much as a whimper. Brian and I started heading back to wait and I heard it. A mommy can pick her child's cry out of a room FULL of crying children. Yep, that was my baby...SCREAMING. Eventhough we have "been there done that" four times prior, my heart still dropped. I wished they had let us stay by his side until he was fast asleep (like at St. Jude where I work) but they don't do that apparently in the real world :) I knew it would be over in 5 minutes...literally. He just got a few minutes of gas long enough to pop the tubes in. And then we met him in recovery:

It took him a while to "blow off" the anesthesia. He was dizzy and disoriented at first and you could tell that frustrated him. After a while though, he calmed down and drank some juice. They discharged us and we headed home.

Once home, he ate 2 scrambled eggs, played for a while and then took a nap. It wasn't as long as his usual naps but enough that he was aimiable for the rest of the day. Tonight, he was back to his old self...and believe it or not I can already see the benefits. He was attempting more words and talking more. I was able to make out a few new words today, so maybe this is just what he needed.

Bath time brought a new experience for him...ear plugs. He wasn't crazy about them at first, but he delt with it. His whole bath though he kept pointing to his ears and telling me something (in toddler talk). The look on his face though when he would tell me what he though of those plugs was hilarious.

Check out my plugs!

As you can see in this short video....he's A-OK! Thanks to all who prayed for him today!