Ella Grace Tanner

Just started a new blog: http://blog.jasontanner.com. 

It’s a hybrid of family life and my design work.

 I’ll keep this blog open for archive sake.  Thanks!

August 9 - Ella was so scared of this little guy but finally warmed up to him enough to hold him for a couple of minutes.  Thought you guys would like to see… I’ll be posting more photos over the next week from here in Florida. 

We’re heading out to Florida for a week tomorrow topped off by a couple days in Atlanta to go see the Braves.  This will be Ella’s first plane ride and she is excited.  I’ll post throughout the week.  Love you guys!

2:00pm - Ella had the appointment at Dr. Yieser’s today.  He thought everything looked really good including the chest tube incisions!  We are very thankful that God answered our prayers.

After the appointment we picked up some lunch and went down to Smothers Park on the river.  I forgot to bring the camera, but Ella had a great time.  She was able to climb to the top of the play area and slide down a big red slide all by herself.  She had a blast!

Ella had a great day today. She is doing well even though she has been confined to this house for over 1 week now; what a trooper! Tomorrow she will be visiting Dr. Yeiser for a checkup. The chest tube incisions are starting to look a lot better. We’ll get Dr. Yeiser’s opinion tomorrow around 11:00am. I’ll put up a post when we get finished.

Ella has been doing well today. Her chest tube incisions look better but we still are concerned about infection. We will have Dr. Yeiser look at them on Wednesday when she visits him for a check-up. Hopefully he will let us know what we need to do to get those taken care of.

Most of you who know Ella know how little she is and how light she eats. That’s what makes the fact that she loves Texas Roadhouse steaks so funny. But she loves them. Tonight I picked up a couple of steaks which she calls “baby steak” because we cut them in little pieces for her. And she ate them quite well along with peanuts, licking the ranch off lettuce, and a roll smothered in butter.

8:00am - By popular demand, I’ll continue updating this blog on a regular basis throughout the day. I didn’t realize so many of you were still reading until I looked at the stats and had a few people ask why I hadn’t updated it. So I’ll continue to keep the site going. After all, there’s nothing else I’d rather do than to write about Ella Grace!

Yesterday we stayed at home instead of going to church. Dr. Christian has advised us to stay at home and away from large groups of people in enclosed spaces. This includes places like the grocery store, church, etc. So we stayed here and played all day. She is really eating well still and is continuing to get better.

Last night we removed the steri-strips from her chest tube incisions.  We’re pretty sure it is infected so please pray God will heal that up for her.

Ella Grace is doing wonderful.  She is playing as hard as she can and just happy to be home.  It’s fun to have conversations with her talking about going to the hospital and surgery.  She has a great attitude about the whole thing.

Last night she got a new pet from Uncle Jon Jon, a baby turtle.  She is calling him ‘Pooh’.  This morning I carried her to look at him and she yelled out “Good Morning Pooh!  Are you hungry?”  So I let her feed him over and over again.  She also helped feed her two goldfish, Oscar and Nemo.  After that we sat down and ate a little breakfast before she climbed back in bed.

Things are going really well at home today.  We slept until around 10:00 only waking once to take all the medication.  Ella Grace is down to just Tylenol, blood pressure medication, and a fluid medication.  Not too bad!

She has been playing hard all day.  Usually at this point, Ella would have taken 2 naps.  One after breakfast and one after lunch.  But today, after the surgery, she hasn’t stop moving!  We are so glad to see her new-found energy.

We gave Ella a bath earlier which was a little tricky.  Natalie and I will have to tag-team this for a while until her wounds heal up.  When she got out of the tub we added a few sterile strips on top of her chest tube holes because they were leaking a little blood.  Now they seem just fine.

I think I’m going to head back to work for a few hours tomorrow.  I want to thank my co-worker Gary for holding the whole thing down while I’ve been gone!

And thank you guys for your continued support through all of this.  The blog is reaching the 7,500 mark so I’ll keep updating it with her progress and added more photos.  God bless!