Improvement, and set back

Natalie's legs beginning of March 2012

Natalie's legs today

I wish these pictures were better aligned for comparison, but its what I have to work with right now.  Her legs partly look better because they look longer with more of her thigh showing.  That said, I think her left knee looks way better.

Today is the day after her steroid injections at Barbara Bush's. 

Lucky for me, her hyperness was gone.  So it was either a side effect or due to her sleep schedule being mixed up.  (If they're wired, they're tired).  But we did still have some good old toddler behavior today.  I did give her a time out once in the morning to calm down in the middle of a diaper change.  I can't even remember what happened.  All I know is she wound up in the hall crying and William was in the play pen screaming.  Life would be easier if William didn't find Natalie's diaper changes the most interesting thing in the world.

So, regular toddler annoyances aside, I did see improvement today.  She climbed up onto our kitchen chairs multiple times, adding to the fact that she has started to climb down off them confidently.  We got rid of her booster seat recently since I was so tired of trying to her to not lean back (a battle I've been losing since we first sat her in a high chair).  So, she can now get up and down from meals on her own!  This is pretty huge.  She also continued to climb up and down off the furniture in the living room, including hanging over the edge of the couch so far I had to tell her to stop so she wouldn't fall on her head.  She also took her shoes off completely by herself.

Over the course of the day, I got her to take off all her band-aids.  There were seven of them.  She had a bruise for all of them.  The worst was from the IV.

Tonight we had a our regular weekly injection.  We decided to switch legs because we don't want to cause a problem always using the same spot.  I put the numbing cream on her tonight just after taking the picture of her legs.  When we went to clean the cream off an hour later, there didn't seem to be any there, even though we both thought I'd used enough and I had put the bandage over it.  Besides, we didn't see it on her clothes.  I was careful to point the needle at a 45 degree angle, but something just wasn't right about it tonight.  I think she saw the needle too much in advance and after everything yesterday she got too tense.  That coupled with the numbing cream maybe not doing its job made the rest of the night rough.  She kept saying over and over again that it hurt in the bath and just barely calmed down by the time it was over.  Eventually we gave her some ibuprofen to avoid her calling us in all night.  It was sad because there wasn't anything we could do to make it stop hurting right away.  We still aren't sure what happened exactly,  It seemed like it was the weekly shot that was bothering her, but she also put her hand near her other injection sites.  We don't know if the bath made them hurt, too, or not.