Jax Skyline River Walk

We had an extremely slow, lazy day, and barring a few traumatic experiences with bandages and medicines, it was pretty nice not to have to do anything or go anywhere. Emmie slept until around 7:45am, and then she got to open up a few more presents from some more of her favorite teachers from school. These were from Ms. Bridgett and Ms. Julia!

She requested “cunch cunch” cereal (which means Cinnamon Toast Crunch) for breakfast at the “picnic table” and she ate pretty well. (Her appetite has been really low since the surgery, so she’s barely eating much of anything.)

Then we just chilled in the room for a long time, playing and reading and watching videos and doing puzzles and coloring. All of which are post-surgery-approved activities. 👍🏼

Grammy actually went to breakfast with some more of our family this morning, and ended up coming back with another gift for Emerson – a plush Moana doll and a matching Moana outfit for Emmie to wear too!

And Grammy just so happened to pick up some bakery treats while she was out too. Emmie wanted to try the cupcake first, but ended up only eating one bite of the icing and deciding she was done!

After much fighting and cajoling and pushing and prodding, we finally got Emerson to sit on the potty and let us change her clothes. She was just being crazy stubborn and very skittish, afraid we were going to hurt her boo-boo’s. Which is understandable, but it literally took us an hour from the time I was showered & dressed, to get her ready and in the car, which is a whole other ordeal. She needed a sponge bath, but she wouldn’t let us, so that’s hopefully gonna happen tomorrow instead.

We decided to try another new place for lunch, which was recommended to me, and also has high Google ratings, called Bread & Board. Mama and I got this buttermilk fried chicken “board” to share, and it was really good. What you can even tell is that the chicken is on an enormous bed of cole slaw, which was more than we could even eat.

When we got back to the RMH, we had two things waiting for us at the front desk. One was a package from Emmie’s sweet friend from church Sydney (a sticker book, and a paint-with-water book), and a letter from Aunt Meggie, Uncle Bo, and even the babies colored in the letter!

Emmie napped with Grammy for about 2.5 hours (she needed it, none of us slept very good last night), and I ended up falling asleep on the little couch for a while too, before finally getting up to start packing and cleaning. We also did a couple loads of laundry here, so that pretty much all of our clothes will be clean when we get back home tomorrow.

Emmie had wanted to go for a walk after lunch today, but since the car thermometer read 100°, we convinced her to wait until later this afternoon, right before dinnertime. So once she woke up from her nap, we went on a walk around 5pm, when it had cooled down to just 94° 😆 There is a teeny tiny pocket park about three blocks away where you can see the river and the skyline of downtown Jax, so we walked there, and enjoyed the outdoors and the blazing sun, and the river view!

This right here is the entire park. It’s probably only about the size of four parking spots!

Little Miss Fashionista, right here! 😂

She tried to be so big and wanted to walk so far, but she did just have open-heart surgery three days ago, so Mommy ended up having to carry her for quite a while on the walk back.

The RMH provided Pizza Hut pizzas tonight, so we grabbed a couple and ate at our usual spot, for maybe the last time. Then we spent a couple of hours cleaning up our rooms and packing as much as we could. We also had to change the bandage on her chest tube drainage site, and that was traumatic for not just her. I ended up crying in the bathroom afterwards, and then when she saw me, she got even more upset all over again. This has just been an extremely emotional and exhausting, and hard nine days. I mostly only write about the good stuff, but honestly there’s been a lot of hard stuff too, as you can imagine.

Anyways, after dinner & packing & bandage changing, she got on her jammies, and called Aunt Meggie and Uncle Bo. We also talked to Nana & PopPop tonight, and Papa earlier today, and one of Emmie’s Sunday School teachers, Miss Anna Kathryn, even video called us yesterday! We’ve also gotten multiple videos from her school friends, and those have put the biggest smiles on her face.

So with jammies on, and ready for bedtime books, she decided she needed some Pringles for her bedtime snack.

She was actually really good and really sweet about getting in bed. She sat in my lap on the floor for lullabies, and we told each other “I love you” about five times back and forth. She laid down in her little floor bed very sweetly, but that was almost an hour ago…. She was so goofy and silly on the phone with Meg & Bo earlier, and Uncle Bo said he couldn’t wait to read the blog to see how bedtime went based on how crazy she was acting 😆 Well, it’s definitely not going good so far. As usual, she keeps telling me she’s not tired and she’s not sleepy and doesn’t want to sleep. By now we all know that’s not true, but we know she’s incredibly skilled at sleep fighting! I sat in there with her for a while trying to keep her company, but she just kept wanted to chat. Jeff and I just switched out and hopefully he’ll get her to go to sleep soon.

We’re planning to eat breakfast, then pack up the cars, then scrap down the rooms. We’ll get lunch here in Jacksonville and then hit the road afterwards. We’re hoping Emerson will sleep a little bit in the car on the drive home, and then we’ll be back to Tallahassee by late afternoon. Still incredible that we’re getting to come home so much faster than we originally thought, and we’re very glad for that. Especially since we have a long weekend, and we’ll still have Monday off of school and work! Pray for us to get everything done easily in the morning, and safe travel back home!