December 4-6 - David's House

December 4-6 - David's House

The drive to David's House was fairly uneventful. I had checked the website and there was no listed food so we stopped for dinner at Panera in Concord. Levi was a crazy man at dinner. He didn't want to sit still, he didn't want to eat, he didn't want to do anything but yell and climb under the table. I swear he isn't usually like that at restaurants, but the people around us probably thought I couldn't parent at all.

We got to David's House around 7:00 as usual. The space room was occupied much to Levi's dislike, so we were assigned the pig room. After we got upstairs to the room he seemed ok with that. Not happy, but ok.

Once we got our stuff in the room we headed down to the playroom to play. Levi definitely needed to get some energy out before there would be any prayer of a nap. We went down the back staircase and Levi was so excited that he could now touch both railings at the same time (a feat he has been trying to conquer for months!)

We got down to the playroom and Levi headed for the slide to play. His new pants were super slippery and the first time he went down the slide he slid right off the end. He thought it was hilarious and kept doing it all night!

Sliding right off the end of the slide. 

Then he wanted to do his normal and have someone build him a tower. We made a family game out of it. Daddy added one block to the tower each time. So we started with a 1 block tower and ended with a big tower. Mommy got to pick the blocks, and it was fun to give Jay a challenge with different shapes. Levi thought it was amazing, but definitely wanted his daddy to build the towers faster. He didn't like having to wait at the top of the slide, and several times slide down before Jay was done building.

After we were done sliding and had cleaned up all the blocks we went over to check out the rest of the playroom. Several of the boxes of toys were very mixed up, so we spend some time sorting out the toys so that Levi could find the blocks and other things that he wanted.

Before we knew it, it was time for bed. Levi picked out several stories for us to read and then we headed upstairs. He picked which bed he wanted and climbed in after we had read stories. Levi picked a few interesting stuffies to bring with him this time. The green parrots name is cuddly, of course piglet and monkey, doggy (a multi-colored dog from Santa's Village over the weekend) was in the car, and Shelley (a turtle that is really mine, but he likes to run off with). Also along for the first time ever was Huggie, Levi's weighted blanket that I finished making for him last week. So far it's been a god send. We will see if it keeps helping him sleep.

The next morning Levi slept in!! We barely had time to get up, eat breakfast, and get over to the hospital on time.

The day at the hospital went well (see post about Infusion #35). And we were back over to David's House around 2:00.

Levi needed a nap and we made him take one. Jay got him to go down fairly quickly and then we waited for him to get up. He slept for just under two hours, which is what he needed.

After he got up he was ready to play again! He came down to the playroom and we started playing right away. He laid out the "roads" and we played with the green dump truck.

The roads weren't long enough and Levi ended up in the hallway playing!

Then we were back to playing with the boxes of things. It's neat to see how his brain works now and he plays with the same toys differently now then he did a year ago. As you can see some of the boxes are missing. We spent quite awhile trying to find everything as well as trying to clean up what was there and make it work. Some things are just gone though.

Levi and I then spent awhile making magnet spaceships. He loved having them blast off, and then rebuilding them as they would almost always end up breaking.

In the process of doing some of the cleaning we came across a lot of things that didn't make us very happy. Lots of people come thru David's House and many of those people respect David's House and are so well behaved, but there are always those that aren't. We found missing boxes, broken toys, colored on toys, stamped on toys including dolls and the doll house, scratched toys. We were very saddened by this. I think we take extra pride in the playroom since we were part of the dedication ceremony, but this playroom has only been around for a year. Seeing toys be destroyed that were donated for the love of children is very sad to us. We hope that people who come to David's house will respect what is there.

Soon it was time for dinner. Dinner had been made tonight and was yummy lasagna and apple crisp. Levi didn't do great at eating, but really more he didn't do well with sitting. We tried to hurry him out of the kitchen as there were several sets of adults sitting at the other table who had no care in the world that a young child was in the room. The language being used was awful! Had it not been freezing cold outside I would have taken Levi and his dinner outside to eat! Food isn't allowed to leave the kitchen or we would have been anywhere but in there to eat. Again people, please have some respect. I understand that everyone there is going thru hell in one way or another, but do you need to make it worse for a family by not even allowing my child to eat his meal in peace?!

We were back downstairs to play! Levi had so much energy and was just running back and forth. At one point I thought it had to be bed time and looked at the clock and it was barely 6:30!

Levi and I made a spaceship out of paper and he flew that around for awhile. Then we headed upstairs to see if the people in the kitchen had left. Since they had, Levi made his volcano in the livingroom.

After that Levi needed to settle a little so we gave him some tablet time. Around 7:30 he decided he was hungry so we went into the kitchen to find a snack. He made a healthy choice and had an apple. Another family with 2 young children had come back. We have seen them before and the three kids "played" happily together, really more like ran around like crazy men, but no one seemed to mind.

At 8:00 we did bedtime meds and headed upstairs with books to read to start settling down. After reading Levi climbed into bed with all of his stuffies, needed Huggie on the turtle side tonight (had him on paw patrol side last night) and was out cold fairly soon.

The next morning Levi was up around 7:00 and for the first time ever at David's House he woke up Jay instead of me! And Jay took him downstairs. It was really nice to sleep in a little. The boys watched some TV and hung out in the playroom. I went down and met them in time for breakfast.

After breakfast we cleaned up the room and mostly pulled things together. Jay will come back over later to get our stuff as long as counts have increased since yesterday and Dr. K thinks that we can go home today. We don't want them to clean the room only for us to need it again like last time.

Thanks again as always David's House!! We will be back! We don't know when, but we will be back!