Kai is doing surprisingly well and life is resuming some of its normality with thoughts shifting to more practical, everyday things. We are catching up on our sleep, although each night still feels far too short. The events of last week are slowly becoming a distant memory and watching Kai run makes it hard to believe that they actually happened. Kai does not talk about the hospital experience at all. In fact, when he went in to get stitches removed yesterday, he let us know that he LOVES going to the doctor. The amnesia-inducing drug versed seems to have done its job of blocking out the negative experiences (what else, I wonder). What remains are memories of visits, presents, nurses compliments, and the hospital playroom (see photos). The downside of these selectively positive experiences is that he has become accustomed to non-stop attention. He is definitely testing how much he can get away with now and has succeeded (more often than I wish to tell) in getting a household of adults to attend to him. He seems to have become more willful, perhaps in response to having had so many things decided for him recently. He wants to be completely independent about some things, but then he acts regressively about other things. These are the ways in which the hospital experience has left its imprint.

Overall, Kai is his same old self with a bit more energy. His sense of humor has definitely returned. When a friend said that "kids are amazing," he responded with an impish smile, "And grownups aren't so amazing" (the way I lost my temper with him this morning as he got me running for this and that, I have to agree). This comment also got us laughing yesterday: my mother was explaining to him that since I was born on my father's birthday, I was her present to him. Kai replied, "Did you wrap her up?" We look forward to laughing a lot more now.