It’s been the final week of Puff’s first term of school, and the first few days of the school holidays, and eventful: all leading up to Puff’s tonsillectomy. With Easter and Anzac Day both falling in the school holidays, there was a school Easter hat parade on Thursday, and the Anzac Day ceremony on the Friday, so very busy times.
Here’s a picture of Puff’s long awaited Easter Hat; he had a friend at school from another grade work on it with him, so it was a big surprise for Mum and Dad.
So far we’ve had a bible study dinner which Huff and Puff went along for – Puff has a new LCD-screened hand-held game to play, which is a bit more educational and a bit less engrossing than other forms of screen entertainment as we keep searching for the game that he wants to pay but is happy to put down.
Saturday we headed down to Wollongong for Aunty C’s birthday lunch. Dad and Puff walked the long way, and saw some giant waves.
After lunch, where Huff doted on baby E, there was a chance for the bigger kids to play on the beach – they had a great time running around and drawing in the sand, and Dad had a chat to Puff about looking at the positive (time to play on the beach) versus the negative (not being able to go barefoot and run in the water) which seemed to help.
We’ve seen Huff starting to show more interest in photos, both appearing in them and taking them. She’s starting to think about framing the photo more carefully: here she is with (current favourite toy) Tweak.
Monday was the last day of active play before Puff had to take things easy for a while, so Mum (after dropping Dad at work) took the kids to Monkey Mania for the day. Huff was much more engaged with the play equipment, and Puff did a good job protecting her from disagreement with the bigger kids.
Tuesday morning we didn’t need to be at the hospital until the early afternoon, so we let Puff pick his choice of breakfast cafe location. After some deliberation with an even further away favourite, we settled on a place in Cronulla where we had colouring in and kid-sized pancakes. Dad helped with the colouring in a little.
One last stop for coffee (anticipating a fairly broken night’s sleep for Dad) gave Puff an extra chance to pose for photos.
From there, we went home to grab our packed bag “paste”, and parked at the hospital to go and be admitted.
We had a while in the hospital room for him to get changed into the provided pyjamas and then wait to be called down. It was a positive experience overall: he didn’t have much of a sense of any potential downsides of having his tonsils out, so he was in good spirits. He looked very tiny in the full-size hospital bed.
Dad went down with him to the pre-op space, and then into the theatre. With small kids, they don’t put a cannula into their hand in the theatre, but rather they put them to sleep with gas, and then tape them up.
Sadly, this meant that after the 25 minutes of surgery and a few minutes’ recovery time, Puff was awake again with a bandaged hand and not sure why his throat was hurting. It took a little while to resettle him, but once the staff offered him an ice block, his spirits picked up again.
Not long later he was back in his room, sharing dinner with his sister.
Dad stayed overnight with Puff: there’s lots of broken sleep between waking up to take him to the bathroom, talking to the nurses who were in once an hour or so to check his vitals, and to make sure he wasn’t wrapping the drip cord around his neck (only a problem once).
The next morning he was in much better spirits, and it was time to drive him home. Expect a much more home-centric update next week!
If you’re looking to take a small child in for a tonsillectomy, drop Dad a line: happy to share further insights.