Day 4: A New Arm and Exhaustion

I’m in the Dallas Airport right now… Jordan is running around in a kids’ play area. She’s the littlest one here, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

We had Jordan’s new prosthetic for about two hours before we needed to head to the airport. Occupational therapy wasn’t extraordinarily helpful since Jordan was spent from all of her hard work yesterday. But we got some great tips and the therapist typed up a bunch of tips and ideas on ways to get Jordan using two “hands.” The big bummer was during therapy we got a little bit of pink marker on Jordan’s new glove on her prosthetic. So the hand is already dirty! I’m pretty bummed about that. Hopefully it will wear down and won’t be as noticeable.

Before we left, one of our former students/reporters came by to interview Jordan and I and the folks who worked with my girl. He’s working on a story about her and Pediatric Prosthetics Inc. for KTRH – a commercial news radio station in Houston. He even ran to the airport to catch some sound with us there.

So we’ve survived the first flight — it wasn’t much fun. The girl is EXHAUSTED and she wanted more freedom during the flight. But I hope running around at the Dallas airport will help her take a great nap

***UPDATE****
We’re home… We’re exhausted. Jordan was fantastic on the second flight. When we were getting close to landing, I started rocking her a little and humming a song. She grabbed her baby, wrapped her baby with the blanket that is now named “Night Night” and started rocking the baby and singing the baby song: “Baby, baby, baby, baby.” When the song was over (and it was 2 minutes long), Jordan started clapping and saying “yay!!” Apparently she was very proud of her song.

She slept in the car once I pulled over and placed “Night Night” on her appropriately. She was screaming her blanket’s name until I had to pull over and fix it. Geez, this girl knows what she wants.

I’ll post a little bit of video of Jordan’s therapy tomorrow. I’m fried from all of the travel and driving.