March 1 8:45 pm

Claire felt great today. One good side effect of the higher dose of prednisolone is an increased appetite!! Claire has actually said the words, "I'm hungry" numerous times today and maybe even meant it! She ate a bowl of cheerios, which consisted of putting the cheerios in her mouth, letting them dissolve, spitting most of them out, and maybe swallowing one or two. But at least they got to the mouth! She also drank the milk from the cereal bowel! And she ate a bowl of oatmeal; which is really rice cereal but she likes to think she's eating big-girl food and not baby food. So it's oatmeal as far as our house is concerned. And she actually opened up big for each bite and purposefully swallowed it! All of it! She loved the airplane, choo choo train, and race car games we played with getting the food to her mouth. It's like having a 6-month old all over again! I love it! She sucked on a teddy graham that Benson gave her in the car. It got soft in her mouth and she asked me to get it out of her mouth, but 99% of it was already gone by the time I put my hand out for her to spit the rest of it into. We're definitely going to take advantage of the increased appetite she's been having and get as much eating therapy in as we can!

And she's actually been sleeping a lot better than we expected too. When she gets wild though, she's more wild than usual and not as easy to reason with. But really, the side effects haven't been as extreme as we were expecting. I can tell she's just not quite herself in some aspects, so it will still be nice to get back down to the lower dose. But for now, we're handling things just fine!

As for labs, things are a little better for the liver. Not a significant difference, but down a little. She will have a biliary tract scan on Wednesday morning and it is expected she will have to be put to sleep for that. I'm not exactly sure how it works but they said she would have to be very still for possibly up to an hour....and that's asking a lot of a little one. Even a good little one like Claire. Based on the results of that, we'll see where to go next. But at least she is still feeling well. Now if I could just feel a bit better and have this cold gone!!